


Happy, few

by Whit Merule (whit_merule)



Series: Happy, few [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angel Wings, Bathing/Washing, Enemies to Lovers, Episode Tag, Episode: s05e19 Hammer of the Gods, Episode: s11e22, Fallen Angels, Gardens & Gardening, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Massage, Pining, Road Trips, Rough Sex, Sharing a Bed, Snark
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-25
Updated: 2016-06-01
Packaged: 2018-06-09 10:23:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 20,523
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6902038
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whit_merule/pseuds/Whit%20Merule
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>'Happy' is relative. On one level, it just means that things have <i>happened</i> to happen to you. It means fortunate. It means chosen. It means lucky - or unlucky. </p><p>For Sam Winchester, it means marked out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Chuck and Sam's Conversation](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6899179) by [Aria_Lerendeair](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aria_Lerendeair/pseuds/Aria_Lerendeair). 



> Reaction to the two final episodes of season 11.
> 
> The first two chapters were written after S11E22 - a coda to aria lerendeair's episode coda, which was the talk between God and Sam mentioned in the episode. Technically you don't NEED to have read that to understand this - but you definitely should!
> 
> From that point on it's AU, but inspired also by the events of the season finale.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And now, let us cast our thoughts back to season 5, to the night before _Hammer of the Gods_...

Ruby’s knife had tasted the blood of demons, angels, and many things in between, including herself (and Sam still wasn’t quite sure where on _that_ spectrum he wanted her to be). He whipped it from his belt before he even knew why.

The huge coyote padded out from behind the soda machine at the corner of the motel. It stood as tall at the shoulder as did Sam, and was brindled all over with hair as coarse and vicious as a porcupine’s spines. Its eyes shone fire, and its canine teeth were as long as Sam’s hand, and it grinned at him as it came.

It was also bright orange.

“Go on then,” said Sam wearily, into its gold-flecked brown eyes. “Who the hell are you?”

It lifted one paw, and pressed it ludicrously to its heart. “You don’t know me? Sammyboy, you called me yourself. Just turning up means you owe me one, right?”

“Called to a lot of things lately,” said Sam. The thunder grumbled moodily in the distance, and the heavy weight that promised hours of heavy rain pressed down the air around them. “It’s called desperation, not idiocy. Doesn’t mean I’m about to let any of them walk right in and put their boots up on the table. Give me a name.”

The coyote’s head tipped slowly to one side, and its long dark lashes fell forward over its eyes. From under their curtain, the eyes gleamed red.

“Jehovah,” it said, and bared its teeth to laugh.

“Uh-huh,” said Sam. “You’re God. Sure.”

It winked. Then it slunk past him, into the dripping, shrivelled trees behind the motel, turning its head as it went so that its eyes never left him. When it was a silhouette against crouching shadows, only the gleaming eyes definite, it stopped, one paw lifted.

“What would you ask,” purred the creature, “if I was? If he was really here, Sam Winchester, what would you say to him here today?”

Sam looked it over.

“I’d call him a drama queen.”

“O ye of little faith.”

“Do you think,” said Sam, through gritted teeth, “that any of this _crap_ would matter half so much if that were true? Show yourself, or I will make you.”

“If you aren’t going to try to guess, where’s the fun?”

“Fine.” Sam rolled his eyes, and hazarded his best possible guess as if he’d worked it out for certain from the start. “ _Gabriel_. Happy?”

It snickered.

It snapped its fingers.

... which was one of those things that the eye only figures out in retrospect shouldn’t have actually worked, resulting in some brain-twisting spasms until suddenly it notices that everything is all as it should have been all along, i. e., the confusing thing was never there in the first place and there’s just...

One archangel, leaning against a tree, arms folded, eyebrow arched, tapping one toe against the ground and smirking.

“You _are_ getting better. Was it my sparkling wit that gave me away?”

Sam pulled a face. “Uh-huh. Catch you in the middle of Tricking some petty little arsehole, Cujo?”

“Oh, that? Just a little something I like to slip into on weekends.” Gabriel winked. It was as disturbing in this form as in the other, especially with the hard glint behind the teasing flutter of the lashes. “And yes. Something very like that. What is it that this _divinely_ handsome and potent being can do for you, my old playfellow and toy? More to the point, what can you do for me?”

Sam stepped closer, out of the circle of dingy lamplight, deeper into the trees.

“You’ve been watching us,” he said, low, knowing it was true. “You know what’s happened just this week. My brother. My _little_ brother. Your big brother. _My_ big brother, trying to throw himself into nothingness because _yours_ have played so well on his conviction that he’s worth nothing. Driving your _little_ brother to do pretty much exactly the same thing in his own way as a giant fuck-you to mine. Gabriel. Don’t give me any of your crap today.”

Gabriel clicked his tongue. “Kiddo. when it comes to family angst? You’re a newbie.”

Sam’s heart felt too loud and too slow in his chest. It had been heavy for so long that he hardly noticed it anymore: it just plodded on, stubborn and angry, and made his fists clench against nothing. Because there was nothing he could grab onto.

Gabriel stayed in the shadows, more silent than it was possible for anything human to be; but his teeth gleamed white when he smiled.

“You ready to make a deal yet?”

Sam’s fists seriously considered breaking themselves on that smile.

“You ready to face up to your family and join the fight?” he snapped instead.

“Not my kind of thing.” Gabriel yawned. “I’m more the ‘mysterious and morally ambiguous McGuffin provider’ type. So. For the night you’re _mine_ , and I clue you in for the big showdown, okay?”

“Yours,” said Sam grimly. “Because I haven’t had enough of angels and demons playing tug-of-war. What would that mean, exactly?”

“Oh, only for a night.” Gabriel actually fluttered his eyelashes, and ruined the effect with a leer. “And you know exactly what that means, kid. Deals sealed, non-angelic style. Nothing but _flesh_ , I promise. No fluids spilled or exchanged of any colour but white.”

“Subclauses. Catches. Loopholes.”

Gabriel rolled his eyes. “Sex. In whatever positions and permutations both parties are most likely to enjoy so long as mutual ejaculation is achieved. Personally, I’d love to ride that trouser-snake of yours. Lawyer-talk enough for you?”

“I think I’m actually traumatised right now.”

“But I’m so sexy,” Gabriel said sweetly. “Ooh, glare at me good baby.”

Sam huffed. “What are you bargaining for?”

“Michael’s got his vessel. Dean’s safe. Well, safe as anybody is now. _You—_ you play your part. You say yes to Lucifer.”

“And in return?”

“I join the fight. And I tell you how to make that _yes_ count for something.”

The lights crackled and went out. A night bird scolded somewhere, and fell silent. The smell of electrical smoke coiled through the trees, and somewhere in the distance flickered the faint apocalyptical light of a fire, out of control.

“You’ve done the horizontal demonic samba,” added Gabriel helpfully, when Sam said nothing. “Might as well complement it with a spot of angel tango.”

Sam took five quick steps forward. The cold air snapped hard into his lungs, and Gabriel’s hair felt soft and slippery between his fingers as he slammed the angel’s head back against the tree.

“You really don’t know when to stop talking, do you?”

Gabriel let himself be manhandled. He let himself be hurt. He let the light show the blood on his lower lip, where his teeth had caught it at the blow, before he licked it and grinned and let the cut heal.

“I’m an older brother, kid. And a younger one too. You think I never learned to stick splinters under nails?”

It was only when Sam kissed him that he shut up.

Or at least, he stopped talking. The bargain was sealed with the cruel laughing curve of his mouth against Sam’s; but there was _speaking_ still in the way it answered Sam’s insistent lips, in the sly insinuation of his hands under Sam’s shirt, in the way zippers and buttons mysteriously undid themselves, in the arch of Gabriel’s back and the shudder of his laughter when Sam’s hands slid down to squeeze too hard on his hips and lift him up into the angry, too-fast press of his body.

Sam didn’t know quite what deal he struck that night in the grove, under crooked claw-like branches, on scraps of leaf mold and gravel, where the archangel’s skin tasted of salt and electricity and despair; but he knew it was the closest thing he could forge now to hope. And he knew that he would take the consequences, all of them, on himself.

 

***

 

The next day, it stormed.

The next day, they pulled in to the Elysian Fields hotel.

The next day, Gabriel joined the fight. And Gabriel gave them the clue for the big showdown. And Gabriel died. 

Sam couldn’t help feeling that the archangel had cheated him.

 

***

 

... so far as Sam knew, that was the whole of the story. For several years to come.

 

***

 

... but _before_ that. Before that.

 

***

 

“Gabriel.”

 _Gabriel. They call me Gabriel_.

Some hours after the Winchesters had left the warehouse, Castiel doused the flames. The place was much darker, without them.

Gabriel said nothing.

“You’re in love with him,” said Castiel, without preamble.

Gabriel’s face stretched into a grin. “Oh hey there. it’s the little angel that isn’t. How’s that working out for you?”

“You’re in love with him,” said Castiel, with no difference in inflection.

Gabriel’s smile stayed, but his voice came out cold as Hell.

“So laughably wrong.”

“No,” said Castiel. “I’m not.”

And they were both of them just as stubborn as the other; but there was something in the earnestness of Castiel’s stubbornness, the sheer _trust_ powering it, that made Gabriel give way first—that made his glare falter, and turn aside.

“I _could_ be,” he admitted, flippant. “What’d you give me if I was?”

“ _No_ quipping,” growled Castiel. “I have spent too much time with the Winchesters lately. They are enough. No.”

Gabriel’s eyes lifted to his again; and this time they were steady, and golden.

“Oh sweetheart. You’ve been too honest with yourself for too long. Terrible for the complexion. I can’t be in love with him, because that would take too much of _me_ all at once. And there isn’t that much of _me_ left.”

And for just that one moment there was truth in his looks; and then he reached out to touch Castiel’s face and spin him away to the other side of the country. And Gabriel fled.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Episode tag: 11x22. (Spoilers, accordingly.)
> 
> In this episode it was mentioned that Sam had had an off-screen conversation with God!Chuck in which he'd agreed to take on the Mark of Cain (and thus doom himself). This chapter is imagined to follow that conversation. It was actually written before the previous chapter, and was written in direct response to aria lerendeair's fic of that conversation. So, if you want to see what happens right before this chapter, [pop over here for a minute or two](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6899179).

When God was gone, Sam stayed very still for a long time.

He stared at nothing very much—just a point on his bedroom wall wall, with nothing in particular to show for itself.

The weird thing was that he was just so resigned about it, this time. About saying _yes_.

How many times could you give up every hope, every idea of having anything for yourself—not a specific plan or even happiness, just a future that wasn’t eternal pain and torment—before you stop being a person altogether?

It wasn’t even a choice.

And that’s the thing. It wasn’t. You can say that and mean a whole bunch of things—you can mean _I know I am morally obligated to do this thing_ , you can mean _I am really eager to do this thing_ , you can mean _someone is twisting my arm so that I can’t refuse_. Or you can just... not really even recognise the existence of an alternative. Because this is the way the story always goes. And sooner or later, you stop caring.

Sam didn’t move, or even really think, for so long that eventually one of the shadows in the corner detached itself and glided over toward the bed.

“That’s the thing about getting a deus ex machina,” said Gabriel. “They always need to boil you down for the grease to oil their wheels. And turns out, once they stop sticking, their main mechanism is to kick you in the balls.”

Sam blinked.

Gabriel arched an eyebrow.

“So,” he said, “who speaks first? do I speak first? do you speak first?”

This earned him a squint.

“ _Star Wars_?” prompted the prodigal son. “No?”

“Didn’t have time to see the new one,” Sam said wearily. “What are you doing here?”

“And that’s it,” said Gabriel. “That’s his reaction. Shoulda made a porn video for you too. Seems like it’s the way to make an entrance. And at least I’m not the one trying to fit into dad’s misshapen old helmet of doom.”

“Uh-huh.” Sam sighed, and ran his fingers through his hair. “Kinda over the whole ‘suddenly not dead’ thing a few years back. Nowadays we just press speed dial on every dead ambiguous ally-slash-nemesis and assume at least half of them will pick up. Couldn’t’ve showed earlier and kept Cas from playing meatsuit to the devil?”

Gabriel shook his head and whistled. “Dead to the world’s wonders already, young padaSam. I’d hit triple digits already before I got that jaded. In millennia. And no, I was indefinitely detained. Until yesterday. When a certain keystone of my gaol cell bit the chaotic dust. Now everybody’s tearing pieces out of the universe and it’s raining miscellaneous power, hallelujah.”

Sam’s level stare didn’t waver.

Gabriel pulled a face, lifted an eyebrow, waved a hand.

“Short version, everything’s going apeshit, I bust out, my prophet-senses tingle because the current prophet is getting the beat-down from God’s sister, I decide that’s above my pay grade in the most literal possible sense except that I never get paid, I put out feelers and figure this is the place to go.”

“I’m tired, Gabriel,” said Sam, with very little inflection. “Tired in every way. Go bother your dad.”

“This is it, kiddo. This is where he was always going to end up—where she will be—where _you_ are, and trust me I’ve learned to know what that means—where it’s all going to go down. I’ve been hanging around wearing my best dark shades and innocent face. Heard the whole Dr. Phil thing with my bro. Very touching. What'd you think he'd say to the sons who didn’t stab him in the back and oh, I don't know, kill me?”

“You got anything to offer,” growled Sam, “or is it all just—blowing your own trumpet?”

The smirk spread across Gabriel’s face, bright and true. “Hah. Come on out, Sammy Winchester. Knew you were in there somewhere.”

Sam Winchester stood up.

He was taller than the archangel. For some reason, although this had always been obvious, it had never been clear.

“Okay,” he said. “I know your thing is grandstanding. Turning this all into your story, some divine plan or some replacement to it. All of you. I know you feel like you're going to swagger into my bedroom and own the conversation and the scene. But here's the thing. Do you actually have anything to offer? Or are you just talking to me because you're still, _still_ too much of a coward to walk out that door and talk to your family?”

Gabriel smiled, nicely. “Watch your tone, meatmonkey.”

Sam rolled his eyes, and turned his back on the angel to pour himself a drink. “Who’s hiding in whose bedroom begging for a way to get in on the action and too ashamed to admit it? You don’t even have a vessel, huh? This is just one of your illusions.”

Gabriel made an exasperated noise behind him. “Got it. So I’m only at semi-power on this plane of existence. But no, I wasn’t coming asking.” His fingers snapped. Sam’s water turned to powerful whiskey, whose fumes burned his nose. “Most of my power nowadays is talking to people. Not that I’m not awesome in myself, because, obviously. But I can always bluff a hand even better than I can deal. Like Tyrion Lannister. Without the scars.”

“You mean you could bring the pagans in on this,” said Sam, and put down his glass.

“Another punch to the jaw for auntie dearest,” said Gabriel lightly. “Could do it. And she’ll probably shake it off. It’d help. With _God’s plan_ , and we all know the genius that is them. Is it just me, kiddo, or are you kinda giving in to His propaganda here?”

Sam said nothing.

“Or,” said Gabriel, drawing it out playfully, “ _were_ you giving in?”

Sam rested his knuckles on the dresser and stared at the empty surface. No photos or decoration, no careless litter. Nothing to show that he lived here—him, Sam Winchester, and not Lucifer, or Castiel, or anybody else who happened to pass through.

“You know,” he said to the wood grain, “I used to wonder. Back when Dean was... well, a demon. What would happen if I exorcised him and all that crap. I mean, I figured it wouldn’t work, because it was _him_ inside _him_ , or if it did work it’d just be throwing his demon soul out of his body and leaving it empty. But it really made me start to wonder about where those boundaries start and stop, y’know? So, if he leaves the body which holds the Mark, is he still Marked? If he possessed someone else would the Mark show on their body? And if someone else—a demon, or an angel—if they were to occupy _him_ with the Mark still there, what would happen to them?”

Gabriel leaned against the wall, all careless, but the sideways look he threw at Sam was sharp, and it wasn’t dismissive, and it wasn’t uncaring.

“Y’going somewhere with this, Popeye?”

“Not sure yet. When God gave Lucifer the Mark, was Lucifer in a vessel? Or was it just him?”

“Just him.”

“And if he had been in a vessel? Or if he still had it now, and was inside Cas? Or if I’d got Dean to say yes to Cas back then?”

Gabriel didn’t answer for one long minute, fifty-five slow thuds of the resigned heart.

Then he straightened up, and sauntered over to Sam (because he couldn’t move in any other way), and he lifted his hand to touch Sam’s chin—to turn it to face him—to make Sam raise his eyes, and look into honey-gold and warmth, and the light of his smile.

“You _are_ a younger brother, kiddo, aren’t you,” said God’s third archangel. “You know all about ferreting out that loophole.”

“Mixed metaphor,” said Sam. “Would it work?”

“A Winchester _would_ demand a guarantee from an angel before they possessed him.”

“So would anybody not blinded by faith in a system they’d only ever understood an idealistic splinter of before.”

“It happens, actually,” said Gabriel, “more often than you’d think.”

“You wormed your way out of it last time. Dying as soon as you joined the fight?”

Gabriel shrugged. “Shoulda specified _don’t die_ in the fine print, darlin’. For all the good it would have done. Told you what would happen if I went up against big bro. Notice you still upheld your end. You said  _yes_.”

“It needed doing. It wasn't a choice.”

“Bullshit. It was always a choice. That's why it mattered.” His voice was hard; but his hand still lingered against Sam's chin, and just for a moment it seemed like it might lift to touch his cheek. Then it fell away. “You know, I heard you too. All your prayers.”

“You?”

Gabriel shrugged, and quirked the side of his mouth. “God-prayers are kinda generic. Sorry. And yeah, I ignored them. Just like I’ve ignored everything that doesn’t lend itself to a good Trickster ploy for a few centuries. Because my life was not your life, and I didn’t feel like tearing myself apart.”

Sam looked at him for a long moment. Then he looked away.

“Not relevant.”

Gabriel sighed.

“Look. No guarantees, kiddo. I don’t know how it’ll work. But you’re right. Best case: I’m hidden, Mark goes on you while I’m in there, I split, _she_ splits, Mark is torn apart and the Darkness is effectively dispersed into a non-sentient force of the universe, just a balance to the Light, and wouldn’t it be nice if we could do the same to Dad and write him out of the picture.”

“Worst case?”

“It doesn’t work. It sticks to you and you’re eaten. Or it sticks to me, and I’m uncontainable. Except by Dad. History repeats itself. It’d probably be you, though, since you’ll be the body and the consciousness in charge of the body at the time.”

“So it’s a chance better than what I had before. Than _we_ had.”

“Pretty much,” said Gabriel, and smiled his sweetest and least trustworthy smile. “If you trust me.”

“You’ll leave me as soon as it’s over.”

The archangel winked. Somewhere in his eye, a supernova was snuffed out, and born again.

“If I feel like it. If it’s convenient. You really want me to make a promise you know I’ll keep only at my own discretion, boy?”

“Honesty,” said Sam drily. “Makes a nice change. So, if it comes to it—all the other things in play, if _they_ go wrong. Will you show yourself? Will you fight?”

Gabriel’s eyes went narrow, and cold as iron.

“I made my choice.”

“And you’re sure you can hang out in... in here, without anyone noticing you? Even her? Even Lucifer, and _him_?”

Gabriel spread his hands innocently, and winked. “Been here for a day and he hasn't noticed me yet. Spied in on this conversation with the big Pooh-Bah, didn’t I? Did he spot a sliver of a hair of me? Hiding, kiddo, hiding is what I have _learned_ to do. ‘S my weakness, right? Trust me to use it for a strength.”

Sam was a resource, to be disposed of in the most strategic manner possible.

He shrugged.

“It isn’t a choice, Gabriel. _Yes_.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Episode tag to (au version of) 11x23. Spoilers, etc.

It only took Sam two weeks to track Gabriel down, after the day the sun didn’t go out.

He sank quietly to one knee beside the dishevelled figure, and held up his phone to see the damage, bit by bit, by its flashlight and the faint stripes of misty moonlight that slunk through the cracks in the walls of the abandoned barn.

Not Gabriel’s preferred sort of hangout, Sam knew.

When Sam knelt down in the dirt and pulled one ragged wing onto his lap, the filthy half-naked body twitched, and flinched in its sleep. Gabriel had more beard coming in than suited him.

“Broken, huh?” said Sam aloud. There was no response; but when he explored the wing more carefully with his fingers, he found the sore points by the twitch and the shudder, and by the sickening shift of things unsteady where they shouldn’t be.

He hadn’t had a good chance to look at these, before—in that crowded moment when Amara had torn Gabriel out of Sam’s body and shoved him into some makeshift amalgam form from the dust of his old vessel. He still couldn’t really see them now—only a too-bright spotlight here and there from his phone which made no sense of the whole—but they _felt_ real. Too real. Too vulnerable. And no human frame could fit the right muscles to carry and wield this weight.

And they were a mess. And there were _things_ living in them.

Sam loosened a few broken feathers, and traced his way up to the shoulder. It throbbed, with too much heat; and it had no covering but the hessian sack that Gabriel had wrapped around himself for a shawl before he’d fallen asleep.

Sam took off his coat and draped it over Gabriel’s filthy naked chest. Then he set to work, with his first aid kit and his careful hands.

An hour or so later, the muscles under his hand twitched with more than reflex, and the wing draped across his knees collected itself, and drew cautiously inwards.

“Who...?” grumbled that familiar old voice, unfamiliarly groggy, incomprehensibly confused.

“Just me,” said Sam. “Shoulda headed to Lebanon straight off the bat, buddy. You’ve made a mess of yourself here.”

There was silence in the barn, and laboured breathing, for long enough that Sam assumed that there was either no reply coming or something terribly witty and annoying. But all he got, in the end, was a cautious rumble of his own name—and a wing that flinched away from his next careful touch.

“Expecting someone else?” Sam murmured, into the gloom, and caught the wing to hold it steady, to add some more careful sports tape. “Who else is going to be looking for you, Gabriel, seriously?”

“So forgive me if I’m not an _expert_ at identifying people by _sound waves_ ,” growled the broken archangel into rotten straw and rotten wood. “So damned primitive. Usually... better resources... here to finish me off, huh?”

“Should I?” asked Sam calmly, and set a warm damp sponge to a mess of dried blood and feathers. Mites crawled out over his hand, and larger things squirmed under his fingers. He brushed them away, and pinched them between messy nails, because he’d got over revulsion a while back. “Obviously. Yep. I just thought I’d tidy you up before I ganked you, because hunters have this code of conduct, right? and shame on me if I got a charcoal outline of messy wings. When did you last eat?”

The body stirred and shifted. A hand fastened on Sam’s ankle for purchase as the shadow levered itself upwards a laborious fraction. Sam’s phone, perched precariously on his knee, clattered to the floor and unhelpfully illuminated a vague square of roof beams; but there was an incredulous gleam of an eye, a painful twist of a mouth all shagged over with beard and grime.

“You try walking into a shop with these things hanging off your back. Super inconspicuous. Especially when you’re _naked_.”

“Uh-huh. Any other obvious injuries I should know about if I’m going to move you?”

“I stink.”

“Gold star,” Sam shot back drily. “When did you last _drink_? Can you walk?”

“Do whatever the fuck you’re gonna do,” muttered Gabriel against Sam’s shin, and passed out.

“Okay then,” said Sam, and cleaned, bandaged, and splinted everything he could find. Then he gathered the grounded archangel into his arms as carefully as he had done for his father—though not so reverentially—and carried him to the car.


	4. Chapter 4

The next time Gabriel woke up, he was in a bed. Or on one, anyway.

It wasn’t the best of beds, but it was reasonably upper in Sam’s usual economic range of motels. And the bathroom had a bath in it, which. With enormous mite-ridden wings strapped awkwardly into splints which wouldn’t fit into shower cubicles, and two weeks’ worth of accumulated grime, probably a good thing.

Sam wasn’t paying much attention to the bed, honestly, so he couldn’t have said when Gabriel woke; but he knew when he felt the stir of movement and breath, of eyes fastening on the back of his neck, of Gabriel owning up to being awake.

“Water jug and glass next to the bed,” Sam said absently, and pulled up the next website in his obsessive searching routine.

There were a few thumps and grumbles and muttered curses as Gabriel struggled his way to (presumably) something like an upright position, sloshed water into the cup and possibly over himself, and emptied it a few times. Then came the sounds of Gabriel discovering the dried fruit and nut mix beside it, and the apple.

Sam knew a little about starvation. He hadn’t put much there, to start Gabriel off; and he carefully gave him the dignity of not turning around until the ravenous noises were done.

He’d left Gabriel lying on his belly. The best the archangel had been able to do was to prop himself awkwardly up on his elbows, arching his back uncomfortably to keep the pressure off the two cumbersome extra limbs splinted and strapped to his back. He looked ragged, and miserable, and filthy.

“Huh,” Sam said, and smiled, not entirely sympathetically. “You look like something out of a Gabriel Garcia Marquez story.”

Gabriel slanted a half-hearted glare in his direction. “Pretty damn sure the initials of the author of this story are G _RR_ M, cowboy.”

Sam shrugged. “Nobody’s died of an easily preventable disease yet. Though your teeth could do with brushing, man.”

“How did I ever overlook that,” sniped Gabriel miserably to his pillow, “while I was _hiding in outhouses_ and _stealing bones from dogs_.”

“Dude,” said Sam, in a shocked voice. “You stole dogs’ bones?”

Gabriel gave him the long-distance stare of don’t-you-dare-say-it. Sam only managed to hold his look of righteous disapproval for a moment before he snickered. Gabriel’s stare turned incredulous.

“The fuck am I doing here, Winchester?”

“Lying on a bed? Healing a little? Guzzling?”

“Uh-huh,” said Gabriel flatly. “You enjoying this?”

“Kinda, yeah,” Sam admitted with a shrug. “Bathroom’s through there, whenever you’re done lying around in your own... miasma.”

“What happened.”

Sam cocked an eyebrow.

Gabriel lifted himself uncomfortably on one elbow, just so he could swivel around to stare more directly at Sam.

“Sun’s not dead. End of days backed off. What happened to Dad? Lucifer? Cas? Hell, give me a fucking update on _Crowley_.”

“Well, that’s kinda the thing.” Sam glanced at his laptop. The screen had dimmed slightly with inactivity, but it was still open at a federal police search database. “Crowley and Rowena, not a clue. But... well, turns out that Amara was more pissed about you being hidden inside me than, you know, the massive soul bomb, so after she ripped you out of me and shoved you into _that_ body and snapped you away to wherever, we... kinda just talked?”

“Talked,” said Gabriel flatly. “We scraped together the most powerful _avengers assemble_ known to God and man, and I’m talking literally here, and Sam Winchester, hunter extraordinaire, saved the world by _talking_ to her?”

“Yeah, funnily enough,” said Sam drily, “my whole ‘you should stop arguing with your family because they’re your family’ speech has had quite a bit of polishing over the years. So then she and Chuck worked things out, the sun stopped dying, she healed him, they went off somewhere to do a few billion years of catch-up, and... well, I guess all those cultures that say the universe is balanced between a god of light and a god of dark, or between a masculine and a feminine principle, are now right. Crowley and Rowena I guess are back to doing whatever they usually do, and... um. Dean and Cas have vanished.”

“Fucking in a cupboard somewhere, probably.”

“Ew. Thanks for that. No, I mean that when I got back to the bunker there was blood on the floor and they weren’t there. Whatever broke in was either human or angel because none of the wards was disturbed, and... well, there’s a bunch of other clues and I’ve got a couple of leads, but you’re kinda looking like you’re struggling to keep your eyes open, dude.”

Gabriel gave him a half-hearted sideways glare, and subsided face-first onto the pillow.

“So your brother vanishes and you hunt _me_ down,” he said, muffled. “Guess old habits die hard. Gonna bring out the puppy-dogs and beg me to bring him back?”

Sam was quiet for a minute. Then he stood up.

“You know,” he said. “That time. And the time after that—that time before you died. You had all the power, didn’t you? First time I was begging you to change your mind. You had the power of—hell, of _everything_ to me. You could literally make Dean exist or cease to exist. You had pulled me out of reality, you created and changed your own body just like that. Second time, too—I was basically a supplicant still. And you came to me in that huge fucking coyote body, changed it at will to your own. Bit more physical reality to it that time, granted. As you proved. I had the scratches on my back for days. And the outcome was, I had to give _my_ body to Lucifer.”

Gabriel lay there, and said nothing; but he turned his face, just a little, so that the gleam of one eye showed against the cotton.

“Time after _that_ ,” said Sam, a little harder, “you had no body at all, but the ball was still in your court. You came to ask me for the use of mine. At least you asked, yeah? This time, though...”

He gestured at the body spread out on the bed, up and down: the ribs showing, the twisted feathers, the bug bites, the ragged nails, the tangled hair. The over-large pants, with the piss stain on one ankle.

Gabriel’s shoulders pulled tight together under his gaze, and the hands clenched into fists, and shoved in under the pillow.

“Let me guess. ‘This time I’m not asking’? Or ‘this time it’s my turn to have some fun’?”

“No,” said Sam, and exhaled. “Not that either.”

He approached the bed; and Gabriel didn’t flinch away.

“You’re very easy to find now,” said Sam, almost gently. “Hell of a lot easier than Dean or Cas. Figured since you were leaving a trail like an elephant in a jungle, Mr ‘Hiding is my Superpower’, I’d better come by and pick you up first.”

“First?”

“Before I keep looking for them.” Sam shrugged, watching Gabriel carefully. “Besides. You’re as likely to be helpful as not.”

Gabriel made an exhausted, sarcastic sound into his pillow.

“ _Also_ ,” he added—and laid his hand on the little fuzz of down between the shoulder blades of the wings—“you may not be my favourite person, but so far as I’m concerned you’re an ally.”

“Not a person,” grumbled Gabriel, after a moment’s stillness.

“And sulking doesn’t suit you,” Sam added, and poked him. “Dude, human or not, you’re a person. Now come on, you _do_ need a wash.”

“Too fucking human,” Gabriel muttered; but he shoved Sam’s hands away and insisted on clambering laboriously from the bed himself.

When he saw the bath, however—and the array of luxurious and colourful bath products that Sam had strategically laid out beside it—he straightened up, and beckoned imperiously.

“... Okay, fuck dignity in the nose. Get me out of these pants, Winchester.”

After someone’s been riding your body while you piss—and do everything else—it isn’t as weird as it should be to lend them an arm to lean on because they’re too shaky to aim their dick at the toilet bowl without it. Re-doing the splints to let Gabriel get into the bath and sit down was more intimate, and (Sam suspected) more humiliating. Just as he’d guessed, Gabriel didn’t have the muscles necessary to hold the wings up, or even to lift them without effort; and the second pair of shoulder blades sat too close below the first, pinching painfully at muscle and nerve.

“Gonna need to keep these in a harness most of the time,” said Sam, as he propped the broken one on a chair beside the bath. “A couple of straps crossing over the chest, maybe? Dean’s better at that sort of thing than I am.”

“Or Dad could fucking _fix me_ ,” Gabriel complained loudly at the ceiling, as he settled into the bath. There wasn’t much bite to it, though: any real bitterness dissolved into the sigh of relieved pleasure at the touch of hot water, and Gabriel barely bothered to grab at a sparkly green bath bomb before he sank down in it up to his nose and closed his eyes and practically purred.

The water fizzed around him, swirls of indigo and forest green, with constellations of silver twisting slowly through the depths. The scent of lilac drifted up; and Sam couldn’t help but watch the coils of colour sliding up Gabriel’s body with a shudder. Too much like demon smoke, or sinister fog, or monsters from the depths of an angry lake.

Just below the surface—nestled in the soft place between collar bone and shoulder blade—he could distinguish the Mark of Cain. Or of Amara. Not red and angry, like Dean’s had been. Just pale and raised a little from the skin, like an old scar.

After a minute Gabriel stirred, lifted himself up a bit, and reached for a loofah and an interesting-looking soap.

“Either you’re a closet hedonist or a kiss-arse.”

Sam shrugged. “I’m not above bribing you with bath bombs. You want me out, or should I go over those wings again? They’re still kind of a mess.”

Gabriel leered—“Sam Winchester, are you offering to give me a sponge bath?”—so Sam figured he was probably feeling better already, flipped him off, and reached for a cloth and a bottle of scented oil.

“So what does that mean,” he asked, gesturing toward the Mark, “now that she’s... not _in_ it?”

“Hell if I know. Some connection to her? Right now, not caring. Fuck, this feels amazing. Can’t get a handjob out of this, can I?”

Sam snorted. “Right now you’re pretty much exactly as sexy as a wet chicken.”

“Laugh it up, fuzzball.”

“Wookie jokes? Really?”

“Hair, height,” said Gabriel carelessly, scrubbing with enthusiasm at one leg. “Habit of speaking only in grunts and roars.”

“Guess that makes you the manic little teddy bear who doesn’t know when to quit.”

“... Walked right into that one, huh?”

“Yeah,” said Sam, smiling to himself. “You usually do.”

“You gonna do my hair as well?”

“Screw you.”

“Worth a try,” said Gabriel philosophically. “Like the handjob. And don’t think I didn’t notice you didn’t actually say no to that, kiddo. So, Sammy Winchester, since I’m not actually the monster who stuck your brother in a timeloop this time, why go to the effort of hunting down and bribing the guy who’s actually worse than useless right now? Not buying the ‘ally’ line. I know just how easily you guys forget your allies when there’s a brother to go all ‘wrath of Achilles’ over.”

“So I’m Chewbacca, and I’m Achilles.”

Gabriel shot him a malicious sideways grin. “Should see Chewie in a berserker rage when Han gets killed.”

“I’ve already been spoiled for _that_. You little shit.”

Gabriel pouted.

“You’re kinda cute when you’re impotent,” said Sam, getting some of his own back.

Gabriel narrowed his eyes, wrath-of-Heaven style. “And you’re flirting. You’re bribing me with more than bath bombs, impotent or not. Don’t change the subject.”

Sam glanced up at him, over the slow, steady strokes of hand through feathers.

“You really think your grace is the only thing that ever made you powerful, Gabriel? If we’re talking assets, damn straight you’re worth keeping around. Even like this.”

“Uh-huh. Androcles and the lion, is that it? You figure Dad’ll fix me up again and I’ll remember who was around to help poor little old me in my time of trouble?”

“Please. I know you. If anything you’d be more of a dick to make up for it. I want your help finding Dean and Cas. That’s it.”

Gabriel gave him a deeply sceptical look. It was spoiled by a yawn.

Sam smirked.

“Lean forward,” he said, “and I’ll do your hair. And when you wake up we go over what I’ve got. Over breakfast. Deal?”

“What kind of a choice is that,” snapped Gabriel.

“As an angel of the lord once said to me,” said Sam innocently, “you’ve always got a choice. Isn’t that kind of the point?”

“You’re a fucking menace,” Gabriel informed him, and leaned forward.


	5. Chapter 5

Sam woke from a deep sleep to the sensation that he was being watched.

On instinct, by experience, he feigned: every muscle tensed in a posture of relaxation, breath forced to the same slow pace even as the heart sped up. Which all came before he realised just who must be watching him.

“Addormentato,” murmured Gabriel’s voice, just on the edge of hearing, “il ciglio tuo mi sembra di rassomigliare il promesso del sole che sorge.”

“Huh?” mumbled Sam—alert senses faded into trust, language filters dulled—“my face? a promise?”

There was a pause, then sarcasm.

“‘Your face looks like a sole when you’re asleep’. By which I mean the fish. You done, kiddo? We’ve got work to do.”

Sam cracked an eye open, and glared. Gabriel was sitting by the bed, grinning, insultingly fresh and chipper.

“You, trying to sound like Dean? Just disturbing.”

Gabriel waggled his eyebrows, leaned back in his chair, aggressively distracted Sam _deliberately_ with his bare chest and what was with that, crossed his arms, cocked his wings all gold and bronze and cream up around his shoulders, held up Sam’s phone, and smirked. Which was far too many main verbs before coffee.

“Called a witch,” he said simply, “who put me onto another witch, who was dead but who got better, who can put me in the way of performing a handy glamour I know of that will hide these lovely feather dusters. We’re detouring via Grand Isle, Louisiana. Now, pay the nice lady behind the desk and get in the car.”

Samhauled the pillow over his head. “I hate you.”

The pillow was pulled away, then hurled at his arse. “You love it. Up, or I give you a delicious oily thigh massage.”

Sam went very stiff, or possibly the rest of his body matched the natural state of its centre point upon waking. He pulled the pillow off his head, and looked at the angel, who was grinning.

“I’m not sure whether that’s a threat,” he said carefully.

Gabriel winked. “Oh darling, you promised me breakfast first.”

Sam grumbled, and pulled the pillow over his head.

“New house rule: no archangels before coffee.”

“Bet you wouldn’t say that to Lucifer.”

“Go find an internet and amuse yourself.”

 

***

 

 _Hey... Chuck. I guess you’re still listening somewhere. I don’t know if... you know, praying now I’ve met you is kinda weird. It’s like, prayer used to mean... supplication, or beseeching the favour of... the ultimate force for good in the world, or... I don’t know. Had more moral overtones, anyway. Now it feels more like leaving a message on someone’s voicemail. So, Gabriel says you—or someone—un-killed the witches who died in that fight, which I suppose counts as tidying up after yourself when you’re God. But you know that’s not all the fall-out, right? I don’t know where Cas is and he’s not answering his voicemail. Either kind. Dean... I don’t know what went down there and I guess it’s not really_ because _of you and her, but the timing’s kinda suggestive and—look. What I’m saying is, I’m not desperate but I’d really appreciate a hand making sure they’re okay. And also... also. I know time was kinda short, buddy, and you were dying for a lot of it, but it kinda sucks that Lucifer got the one-on-one time with Dad and the two sons who didn’t rebel against you got pretty much nothing. Except, you know, a few snarky one-liners from Gabriel while we were working out the soul bomb, and you looking all martyred and disapproving at him. I just think it would mean a lot to both of them if they could have some kind of resolution there. And maybe a chance to yell at you for their own sakes._

_And Chuck, if this thing with Gabriel—the graceless body with wings thing—if that’s meant to be some kind of a lesson or punishment, it’s pretty damn obscure and more than pretty damn unfair, okay? Just. Um. Sorry, no disrespect. But if you’re going to tidy your shi–your mess up, it’d be great if you’d do it equally._

_... Amen, I guess._

 

_Hey, Cas, you listening? Don’t know where you are, buddy, but I’m looking for you. You do remember my number, right? Call me as soon as you can._

 

***

 

Sam was not used to being casual with Gabriel. Their relationship had been all antagonism and intensity; and he was rather relieved that the cumbersome shape on his back made Gabriel elect to stretch out on his belly in the back seat rather than ride shotgun. Somehow, he had managed to ferret out Dean’s shameful hidden stash of vintage Marvel comics from the nook under the back seat that he thought Sam didn’t know about; and he spent the hours to Louisiana flipping far too fast through them, commenting or snickering at regular intervals and seldom needing any response. Apparently being stuck in a human body might mean a human digestive system, but it didn’t limit him to a human processing speed when it came to reading books.

Clea was much more welcoming than Sam had expected, given they’d got her killed. But then—from a cynical point of view, and as Gabriel had pointed out to Sam himself—any chance to help out an archangel in difficulties was almost as good kudos as teaming up with God, and the fact that she was standing here now, alive and with her eyes not burnt out, was good proof that favours could be returned.

And then, and then—there was also the fact that they were some of the few people in the world who knew just what had happened, and they were willing to sit down to a cup of tea and a chat. Which is, of course, a powerful bond.

She called in her payment before any other business, and all she asked for was one truth: the name and nature of the Darkness.

They gave it to her—Amara, God’s sister or opposite—and they told her too of the outcome of the oldest of family feuds. When the story was done, they all three sat quiet for a while, and Gabriel spooned more sugar into his tea.

“This is precious knowledge,” said Clea; and Gabriel winked.

“Don’t hoard it up, yeah? I’d say, spread it around. Daresay auntie dearest could do with a few more Facebook friends.”

“You’re right,” said Clea, and turned over the crucifix that hung at her neck. “This will mean a good deal to witches. An opposite to light is always necessary, and Lucifer is limited and dangerous. Besides: a feminine principle, unlocked at last? It’s about time, archangel.”

“Neither of them’s either, really,” said Gabriel, “no more than I am. But that don’t seem to have made much difference throughout, y’know, the last couple million years of human history.”

“Yes,” she said. “It is the idea that matters, at least to us. To people.”

“Haven’t there been plenty of cultures and belief systems that have had powerful women?” asked Sam. “More powerful than the men, sometimes?”

“But we live here and now,” she said. “Oh yes, there are people who talk of an Earth Mother, or any of a dozen others. Gods that nobody’s ever seen—ideas to call on. And there are real goddesses, in their own limited way. But in the end, here, now, in this country and culture, the Creator god _is_ the centre and the pinnacle; and he is a him, at least in people’s heads. There’s a power in that. And so there is a power in giving a name to a woman, who balances him out; dark and light, not evil and good. Now, what is it you need for this glamour?”

Clea had the ingredients, and Clea had the power; but she drew the line at weaving the glamour herself. That wasn’t her skill, she said; and with her luck Gabriel would end up with an extra head when viewed from the wrong angle.

“Well,” said Sam, when Gabriel seemed stumped, “isn’t it lucky we’ve got someone who’s spent more than a thousand years trading in illusions and glamour?”

Gabriel blinked at him. “Um, hello? Grounded. Useless.”

“Skilled.” Sam shrugged, sat back in his chair, and grinned at him. “She’s got the power, you’ve got the experience. Match made in Heaven.”

“I’ll screw it up.”

“You’ve never screwed up an illusion yet. Not without meaning to.”

Gabriel smirked. “Oh, you figured that out, huh?”

“Flirt on your own time, lads,” said the witch. “Let’s give this a try, shall we?”

And Sam wasn’t mistaken—it was when he let his voice warm, when he smiled at Gabriel as if he meant it, that Gabriel became warmest in return.

Sam had felt the deep loneliness inside Gabriel when the angel had been possessing him, and the old bitter hurt. It would, on the face of it, make sense for Gabriel to reach back eagerly for anything that felt like friendship; but he was antagonistic to Dean, scornful to Crowley, defensively sarcastic by habit. Sam knew all too well how hard it could be to set loneliness aside, once it had become a part of you.

And yet, for some reason, perhaps even without meaning to, Sam had this power with Gabriel. Gabriel had accused him of flirting, of _offering_. Not sex, or at least Sam didn’t think so: years of living with Dean had taught him to recognise when somebody was deflecting from feelings to sex. Sam had a power, and Gabriel felt it; and even though he was on guard against it, he couldn’t help himself.

So it was up to Sam what he did with it.

 

***

 

They only drove another two hours, that day. At the look on Gabriel’s face when he clambered out of the car, Sam dug out some decently strong painkillers and tossed them to him.

The motel only had a single room with a fold-out cot.

Gabriel managed to break the cot. Sam wasn’t sure whether it was deliberate or not, since he was all grouch and snark by then.

They shared the bed. Gabriel promised only to molest him a little, then he passed out.

Sam carefully removed the amulet that held glamour from around his neck, checked how his wings were healing, and fell asleep.

He woke up halfway through the night pinned firmly in place by an arm and a leg and a heavy feathery blanket, with somebody snoring faintly into his neck. 

Sam wasn’t really used to sleeping with people, not anymore. Certainly not people who slept _at_ you rather than beside you.

Without quite waking up, he curled his arm around the rise and fall of bare skin, the ridges of ribs, the warmth of slow breathing. He ran his fingers up along the spine (too bumpy), feeling the pulse of the heart, until they snagged in the downy little curls of feathers between the shoulder blades.

That woke him up.

Gabriel stirred, and nosed vaguely in against his neck.

Sam’s breath hitched. His fingers pressed into the bedsheets, and crumpled them into a spiral; but the feeling that really startled him, in that moment, was the unfamiliar tenderness.

“’M?” Gabriel mumbled into his skin. “Promets-moi une vérité?”

Sam swallowed, and raked hastily through his mental dictionary.

“Sure,” he whispered. “Vérité... pour vérité. Qu'est-ce que tu veux... domander? Savoir?”

But Gabriel was fast asleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Italian: yes, Gabriel is being sappy and awed.  
> The French: you can probably guess it, but if not, it'll become apparent later, because Sam will totally cash in on that implied promise.


	6. Chapter 6

Sam let Gabriel choose the music.

He regretted it.

Gabriel seemed to have decided to be provocative again; and, perhaps being low on energy, was doing it by changing the radio channel every minute or five, just as Sam was getting used to the latest genre music or talk show or ad for farming implements. Which would have been less annoying in itself if Gabriel hadn’t had to lunge over from the back and hang over Sam’s shoulder every time he wanted to do it.

He still wasn’t wearing a shirt. But he was wearing Sam’s favourite oversized sweater (to fit over the wings), and it was tickly and cuddly and pressed up against Sam’s neck provokingly every time Gabriel leaped over the seat, and—

“Dude. Pick a channel.”

“But I haven’t found my _favourite_ yet.”

“Then tell me when you want it changed and I’ll do it.”

Gabriel leaned his elbows on the seat back just by Sam’s shoulder, and beamed beatifically at him in the rearvision mirror. It made his eyes sparkle, sunlit and sly. “Oh, it’s okay. I don’t mind leaning forward!”

Sam glared. “Don’t make me turn this car around.”

Gabriel bounced in his seat. “If I’m very bad, Daddy, will you spank me?”

“...” said Sam, and actually found himself blushing.

“Oh, so you _can_ be struck mute,” Gabriel murmured in his ear, in quite a different tone. “Good to know.”

Sam cleared his throat.

Gabriel’s breath brushed warm against Sam’s neck, and the heat of his voice and his eyes coiled down Sam’s spine and stirred his blood. The skin prickled, as if Gabriel was leaning further in, as if his lips were just a shadow away from touch.

Then Gabriel lunged forward over the seat back to change the channel again. Something with classical music.

“I would say ‘daddy issues’,” said Sam, finding his voice annoyingly unsteady, “but that’s kinda superfluous at this point.”

And it was. Gabriel didn’t reply. He’d gone very still, listening with his head cocked.

 _Lift up your heads_ , sang the choir on the radio, _o ye gates! And be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors, and the king of glory shall come in!_

_Who is the king of glory? Who is the king of glory? Who is the king of glory? The Lord, strong and mighty—The Lord, strong and mighty—the Lord mighty in battle!_

“Huh,” said Gabriel, with a bit of a laugh. “Until his own sister gets him in a chokehold. Then he just mopes around dying for a while and drinking tea with witches.”

“Did he ever actually do much of his own fighting?” Sam wondered. “I always got the impression that when it says ‘the Lord smote’ or ‘the Lord fought’ it just meant He sent angels. Or, you know, Michael or somebody sent them in his name.”

“For most of human history, yeah.” Gabriel subsided back down onto his seat, kicking his feet in the air behind his back as he listened.

_He is the king of glory! The lord of hosts, the lord of hosts, the lord of hosts, He is the king of glory, He is the king of glory, of glory!_

The chorus ended.

“Oh shit,” said Gabriel softly, as if he’d just realised what came next.

A lone male voice: _Unto which of the angels said He at any time, ‘thou art My Son, this day have I begotten thee’?_

“Well,” said Sam drily, “unto Lucifer, now.”

And the whole chorus burst forth, joyous: _Let all the angels of God worship him! Let all the angels of God, let all the angels of God worship him!_

“And they’re so fucking happy about it,” said Gabriel softly to the window of the car, staring out at the sky. “Just a glimpse of why Lucifer held a grudge, y’think?”

“Huh?”

Gabriel snapped his fingers. “Focus, kiddo. _Him_ here isn’t God, it’s Jesus. The point is that Dad elevates this one human above all of us—calls him “son” as he never did for us—and for that, we should... we should celebrate. Or so the humans say.”

“Is it true?”

“Does it matter? By the time this was written he hadn’t called us anything for millennia. Didn’t call Jesus anything either, come to that, but why let that get in the way of a good story. True in essentials: the new baby, the favourite child.”

But his voice wasn’t bitter. It was faraway, troubled and dreamy; and as the voices rang and danced and delighted and worshipped, it was impossible not to be carried along in the sheer brilliance of celebration.

_Let all the angels of God worship, worship him!_

And as the chords rang to their sublime close, Sam almost thought he saw the trace of a smile hovering on Gabriel’s half-open mouth. Like at last he got it.

It was a strange marvel, these mercurial changes in him: so easily skipping from one mood to another, not as if they were superficial but as if all of them loomed vast just below the surface. It was oddly entrancing, and Sam found himself wanting to draw him out, to work out how it happened.

“What is this?” he asked, as a solo began and declared that _thou art gone out on high_.

Gabriel tipped his head a little to the side, just enough to give Sam a look of scorn. “Handel’s _Messiah_ , you uncultured harpy.”

“Harpies are known for not appreciating arts and literature, are they?”

“And you should see their table manners.”

“Hey, are harpies actually real? I’ve never come across anything in the lore that’s, y’know, on the _lore_ side of the internet instead of the myth and fantasy sort of thing.”

“Couple of little colonies left on rocky islands in the middle of the Aegean. Charybdis is still out there too, by the way. Swallows a fishing boat from time to time. Not Scylla. She was too showy to last. Someone took her out... oh, back in the third century BC.”

“We say BCE now.”

“Aren’t you a special snowflake.”

“Was Odysseus real, then? And all of that?”

“Tell you what. If I ever get my wings back—my _real_ wings—we’ll go a-visiting. How’s your Ancient Greek?”

“Pretty much non-existent.”

“Good, it’d just confuse you. He wouldn’t recognise it anyway. Mess of different dialects and accents all over those few centuries and islands.”

“Tell me.”

And Gabriel did, weaving his voice and his memories Penelope-like in and out between the strands of Handel’s interlocking counterpoints, pausing only now and then to snicker at _How beautiful are the feet_ , or to comment ironically on _why do the nations so furiously rage together,_ bouncing his feet above his back to _great was the company of the preachers_ and _let us break their bonds asunder_. Sam listened, entranced despite himself by the teller as much as by the tale, by the anecdotes and sly little asides, by the way Gabriel would slow down now and then, like the music, to a slow, stirring, deeply _human_ reflection that seemed all the more meaningful for the lightness that came before and afterward. And despite Gabriel’s habit of painting himself into these stories only as a lascivious creep or a cocky idiot, whose own downfall was the punchline, Sam thought perhaps he glimpsed more of Gabriel than he had even when they had shared a body for a day. There was the compassion, and the admiration (even the wonder) of so many of these exceptional people and deeds; and there was the deep, deep fury that peeked out just now and then from beneath the flippant narrative.

And yes, it was casual. Sam wasn’t used to talking to him like this, meandering on through thoughts and ideas and feelings and nonsense. He wasn’t used to talking to anybody like this really. It felt... anticlimactic.

Sam Winchester thought he could do with some anticlimax.

All at once, a chorus ended, and Gabriel broke off abruptly with his finger lifted.

“Stand up!” he hissed.

“Huh?”

Gabriel knelt up on the back seat, head crammed against the roof and wings knocking it awkwardly.

 _Hallelujah!_ burst out the chorus on the radio. _Hallelujah! Hallelujah!_

Gabriel punched Sam in the shoulder. Then he lost his balance and half-fell into the footwell. Sam almost swerved off the road with laughing.

_The kingdom of this world is become the kingdom of our Lord, and of his Christ, and of his Christ. And he shall reign for ever and ever: King of Kings, and Lord of Lords. And he shall reign—and he shall reign—and he shall reign for ever and ever..._

But some time later, as the soprano (and yes, Sam _did_ know that word thank you) asked again and again, _If God be with us, who can be against us_? Gabriel fell silent again. And this was the speculative silence again, not entirely happy.

“What does that _mean_?” he murmured, barely aloud, as it came to an end. “I mean, you’re not talking about a conscious being there, you’re talking about a... a force, a balance in the universe, a moral principle.

 _Worthy is the Lamb that was slain_ , declaimed the chorus, slow and majestic, _To receive power—and riches—and wisdom—and strength—and honour—and glory—and blessing!_

_Blessing and honour, glory and power be unto him, that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb._

And on and on, building up from the bass—and then the _Amens_ , a whole chorus just of that over and over again.

Then the radio announcer’s voice, telling them what they’d been listening to; and Sam switched the radio off.

“King of Kings,” pondered Gabriel aloud, “and Lord of Lords.”

Sam wasn’t sure whether he was talking to him or thinking aloud; and so he stayed quiet.

Gabriel’s eyes swung toward him. They were brightly dark as whiskey, and ancient; and for the first time since he had picked him up in the abandoned barn, Sam _felt_ the danger and the depth of the archangel again. “Angel of the Lord, you called me,” he said, almost too low to hear over the rumble of the Impala’s engine. “And hey, we started listening too late to hear my little cameo with the shepherds. _And lo, an angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone down about them, and they were sore afraid._ Don’t know what Dad is anymore. Which means I don’t know what...”

“What you are?”

“These are all the stories that _humans_ told about him,” muttered Gabriel, almost to himself again, faraway and unreachable. “All the joy, the ideas, the... the _meaning_ of it. But it’s been so long for us. And... sure, perfect memories, but you build on memories. You live with them. You change them as you live. How much of these stories are ours too?”

“You know,” said Sam carefully, after the silence had stretched out into a minute or more. “Most people go through a ‘my parents aren’t infallible or omnipotent’ crisis at some point.”

Gabriel’s eyes snapped up to the mirror, and he glared. “Not _people_ , Winchester,” he grumbled, suddenly back on the mortal plane. His hair was tousled, and the sweater he’d borrowed from Sam was too big and fluffy on him, and the soft evening sunlight turned him grey and gold in streaks.

“Sure,” said Sam, grinning at the mirror. “Sure you aren’t.”

Then his phone rang.

Sam lunged.

“Sam, it’s me.”

Castiel’s voice was deeper and rougher than ever.

“Cas!” Sam felt the relief and delight spreading over his face. “Are you okay? Where are you? You sound terrible!”

Gabriel dived forward over the seat back, grabbed the phone, and put it on speaker.

“Hands on the wheel, I’m precious cargo!”

“Seatbelt, precious cargo,” Sam shot back.

“... Gabriel?” came Castiel’s cautious voice. “You have your own vessel again?”

“Sam _was_ my own vessel,” Gabriel pointed out. “And now I have this old thing.”

“Cas,” Sam shoved in, “where’s Dean?”

“I’m fine. He isn’t with you?”

“He isn’t with _you_?”

“No, I landed in Ontario. I woke up this morning. My cell wouldn’t connect. Then I had to charge it, and I couldn’t find the right cord, and then I did find out but apparently it was a ‘cheap knock-off’ and it fried my phone, so I had to replace it.”

“Okay, well, can you get back to the bunker?”

“Yes, I’ve hotwired a car.”

Sam laughed, despite himself—felt the fondness rising up warm inside him, the relief at having _this_ person back in his life, after all the crap of the past few months. Castiel—fights his way back from being knocked out for two weeks by hostile magic, works out where he is, hotwires a car, defeated by a phone charger. Sam’s idol and his adoptive little brother all at once.

“You got any idea who took Dean, Cas?”

He heard Castiel’s frown over the phone. “She was in the bunker when we came down the stairs, after you—whatever you did that made Father vanish and the sun revive. She had sigils drawn up all ready, and banished me just as I saw her. I assume she took Dean.”

“Okay. Okay, but what was she?”

“Human, but well warded. I don’t know who, and I only saw her for a moment, but... she had an abscessed wisdom tooth which had clearly been receiving attention for some years and early stages of bone cancer which hasn’t. She has lived in England for much of her life, had London air in her body so came directly from there within the last forty-eight hours or so. Her voice is shaped by a refined Oxbridge accent. She stood in the space as if she felt some connection to it. When she looked at Dean she expected somebody else as well—you, I suppose—and felt towards you righteous anger but not malice. There was also about her a sense of strong purpose, of... protectiveness. She clearly knew what I was and how to send me away and knock me out.”

“Huh,” said Sam. “Cas, we’ll make a hunter of you yet. So, Dean—”

“I believe that Dean is not in any immediate danger, if she has him. She would want to talk, and to draw you out. I think.”

“And her appearance? Hair colour, skin tone, age?”

“I...” Castiel sounded sheepish all at once. “I didn’t notice.”

Sam met Gabriel’s fond, laughing eyes in the mirror, and shook his head. “Doesn’t matter, Cas. That’s a great start. I can work with it. Thanks. We’ll be there... we can be there tomorrow evening, if we push it. But,” at Gabriel’s involuntary flinch, “I’d kinda rather not unless we have to. You’re still to the north?”

“Yes. I’ll be... I’m not sure. Another day, perhaps. There’s... something I have to do first.”

He sounded uncomfortable. The way he did when he was lying. Sam sat up straighter.

“What’s that, Cas?”

“I...” Castiel shuffled uncomfortably, on the other end of the line. “I’d rather not say, Sam. Not just yet. I don’t know whether it will... turn out to be true. I don’t want to get your hopes up.”

“Huh?”

“Nothing bad. Sam, if you... if you get a phone call that seems unbelievable—too good to be real? Believe it.”

“’Cos _that’s_ not suspicious, little bro,” Gabriel chimed in.

Castiel paused, then his voice came back, irritable and tired. “Gabriel, you know this is me.”

“Yeah,” said Sam fondly. “Yeah, we do. If you say—Okay, Cas. I’ll keep the phone by me. See you soon.”

“Yes.”

“Cas? I’m glad you’re okay.”

“And you.”

“No, I mean... I missed you.”

“... Oh.”

Gabriel pulled a face in the mirror.

“... Cas, I mean, don’t you ever do shit like that again because I want you alive, okay? And not possessed by the devil. Got it?”

“Yes.” Castiel sounded bemused, pleased. “I... got it, Sam. Thank you.”


	7. Chapter 7

They travelled only until the early afternoon, this time, because Gabriel’s temper was getting short and vicious, and Sam had a good guess about the reason.

This motel room had two beds, and as soon as Gabriel flopped face-down on one Sam tossed the painkillers and a bottle of (light) beer beside him and told him to get over it, and stormed out to go for a run.

When he got back, the beer bottle was empty, the painkillers were untouched, and Gabriel was half asleep in exactly the same position that Sam had left him.

“Hey,” said Sam carefully, “those are anti-inflammatories. You really should take them, you know. Being in pain makes you knot up and makes it hurt more later.”

Gabriel half lifted one exhausted hand to flip him off.

“Fine,” Sam huffed. “So, what, you’re just going to wait for some generous soul to come by and give you athorough masseuse session?”

Gabriel turned his head, squinted sideways under one arm. “Your French is crap.”

Sam lifted an eyebrow.

“ _Masseuse_ is feminine, _masseur_ is masculine or default, you Americans have just started using _masseuse_ lately ‘cos you think it sounds fancier and more French, I’m guessing anybody offering magic fingers in this room is going to be male, get on with it. Monsieur le masseur.”

“Uh-huh,” said Sam. “Except I just picked up takeaway and there’s a really nice view from this window of—huh, a car park and a dumpster, so—”

“Please.”

“What?”

“... don’t make me say it again.”

“Heaven forbid,” said Sam drily, and fetched the oil.

It was a hard, thin back when it was bared, all knotted up with pain and with no spare flesh. Sam felt obscurely that that was wrong: that Gabriel _should_ be soft to the touch, should be stocky or even plump, should look and feel _comfortable_ to offset the sharpness of tongue and eye, to cover the ragged edges inside. He found himself reluctant to press too hard, or even to sit on Gabriel’s thighs to touch; but the wings made it difficult either to lean over from beside the bed, or for Gabriel to sit forward between Sam’s knees.

At the first long, warming stroke, Gabriel shivered. At the second, he tensed up, as if he’d given himself away. When Sam cupped his hands over both shoulders, thumbs between the blades—squeezed gently, ran the pressure downwards in promise—Gabriel exhaled very carefully, and began to relax.

And when Sam ran his fingertips down his spine, brushing through the feathers and spreading out over the arch of the back, the sound Gabriel made was pure sin.

Sam breathed carefully through his nose, reached up, and parted the dishevelled waves of hair across the back of Gabriel’s neck.

He could do anything up here.

“So, uh.” Sam tipped oil into his palm, and warmed it between his hands. “England?”

“Mmm,” Gabriel probably agreed.

Sam ran his hands down Gabriel’s sides, making him squirm just a bit between his thighs; up again from the waistband of his pants over his back, between the wings, to slide around the shoulders and the sides of the neck, spreading the oil. “You’d have some contacts there, I guess?”

“Mmmmm.”

“So we meet up with Cas and see if we can track down anyone with those medical records, match them against flights from the UK to Kansas in that week then expand the search if there’s no matches, and at the same time start to make enquiries into any humans or human organisations in England who might have an interest in us...”

“Apart from everybody?” Gabriel mumbled into the pillow.

Sam poked him in the ribs. “You know what I mean. And who might be able to find out about the bunker.”

“Like, oh say, Men of Letters?”

“There aren’t any left. Just us.”

“Y’sure?”

“... Hm. Either way, getting you through airport security is going to be a nuisance. I guess the glamour won’t fool scanners. And trying to make you sit still in a tiny plane seat for hours would probably be worse than trying to get Dean not to throw up or stab people before we hit cruising altitude.”

“Or,” Gabriel drawled into the pillow, “I could call my dad for a ride. Hah.”

Sam dug his fingers in between the double shoulder blades on either side, ran his thumbs along the strange inhuman seam, pressed up on the tight muscle with the heel of his hand.

“Stop that,” he said quietly.

“Mmmmohshitmmmmm?”

“Joking about how useless you are. I get enough of it from Dean and it’s no more true from you.”

Gabriel grunted noncommittally; then he grunted because of something Sam did with his hands, so Sam did it again, and it tailed off into a breathy whine.

Sam carefully shifted the angle of his hips to prevent a certain pressing problem from... pressing.

“I, um,” said Sam; and touched the back of Gabriel’s neck. “I kinda owe you an apology.”

“You... you owe _me_?”

“Yeah, I know, you still owe me a few hundred, but... that’s not really anything to do with me, y’know? Let me do this.”

The soft skin trailed little valleys after the pressure of Sam’s thumbs: careful circles around, and around, and around, just under the dappled copper-and-cream arch of the wings. The air felt very still, warm as a touch. The bustle and roar of the nearby motorway was muted; and the light danced slowly across the bed, across Gabriel’s oil-slick back, with the tossing of the trees outside.

“Dean was mad at you,” Sam began, awkward, “after she turned on Chuck and ripped Lucifer out of Cas. After the sun started dying. He thought you should have stepped up and fought back, or that you should be the ace up our sleeve since she still didn’t know about you and we had no other plan, but—”

“Yeah, I remember. Your brother kinda makes it obvious when he’s pissed. Spreads it around peanut butter.”

“— _but_ , I felt it, okay? I felt you try to grab onto the Mark and keep it on us when she fought back. I felt what it took out of you when she ripped away. I know it hit you hard, and that you weren’t anywhere near full strength after that. I shouldn’t have let you come with me to take the bomb to Amara.”

Gabriel scoffed. “ _Let_ me? You couldn’t have done it without me.”

“Yeah,” said Sam, “I could. Sure, I’d have had a pretty damn short fuse before going nuclear, and sure I might not have managed to handle all those souls or channel them out in the right direction at the right moment, but probably? I could have. You were just the failsafe.”

“Kiddo, _you_ were just _my_ disguise.”

“Okay, so we’re all self-sacrificing dumbarses. Nothing new there.” Sam pressed in harder, working the muscles, kneading like he’d sometimes seen Dean do with pizza dough in the kitchen. Gabriel swore softly, abandoned whatever retort he had been going to make, and sunk bonelessly into the mattress.

“Y’know why I needed you, Gabriel? It was because. If I hadn’t had an angel riding along. Dean would have done it. Dean would have been able to argue that, since he’s the one she likes best, it should have been him to do the Trojan Horse thing. Even though he _promised_ to leave the final blow to me. But with you, with you I could say ‘I’ve got the better chance of making it: let me go’. And he couldn’t argue. And you ended up like this.”

“You little shit,” Gabriel groaned, arching into Sam’s touch. “You— _ugh—_ you seriously trying to make like you _used_ me? Like I didn’t choose?”

“No.” Sam leaned down, just a little closer, mouth half-open, breathing in the smell of his skin and feathers and the faintly fruity scent of the oil. “That’s not what I’m apologising for.”

He could almost feel his breath curling back against his mouth, warm, from the warm skin on the back of Gabriel’s neck; and this time when he slid his hands down, it was slower, firmer; and his fingers slid around to span Gabriel’s waist. It twitched under his touch.

“It would have been my brother,” Sam said, low, “and you know I couldn’t let that happen. Knew it would probably take me out. And beyond saving Dean—leaving him with Cas—yeah, I wasn’t too bothered about what other damage she’d do. To me, or to anybody nearby when the bomb went off. Or to you. _That’s_ what I’m sorry for.”

“You,” growled Gabriel, low and rough and half lost in the pillow, “are the most nobly idiotic numbskull I’ve ever— _fuck_ —fucked. Lot to choose from. Custer, for one. Anything else you want to beat yourself up for while we’re— _oh_ —while we’re at it?”

And it was such a bad idea, but...

Sam chuckled, dug his thumbs into Gabriel’s lower back, leaned down a little closer so that he was _almost_ nuzzling in between the wings, and murmured, “Hmm. Nope, I’m good for now.” Then, just as Gabriel’s breath turned shallow and he began to turn his head back over his shoulder, Sam sat back up.

“How ‘bout you?” he said, brightly.

Sometimes you don’t notice a sound until it’s gone, a movement until it stops. Like, for example, the slow, hopeful circles of hips against a mattress; and their sudden guilty stillness when you suddenly settle back down into a sitting position.

“Uh,” said Gabriel, when Sam went still in his turn. “Ignore that. You were saying?”

 _Really_ bad idea. Probably. For some reason which Sam couldn’t quite think of right now. Like... taking advantage, and making things more complicated, and...

Sam lifted one hand slowly from Gabriel’s back, palm then fingers then fingertips. He leaned forward, slipped it in under the sensitive secondary feathers and drew them between his fingers, tugging a little as they settled back into place. Then he put it firmly on the back of Gabriel’s neck, knotting the fingers in fine chestnut hair.

“Did I tell you to stop?” he growled.

Gabriel shuddered all over; and this time the sound that clawed its way out of his throat was helplessness, and triumph.

Then Sam’s phone rang.

Sam swore. Then he dove for it.

“Sam?” said the voice on the other end, breathless and—and _familiar_.

Sam couldn’t find his voice.

Gabriel dragged himself up onto his elbows, dishevelled and flushed and glaring, and said “Whoever the _hell_ it is, they—”

Then he saw Sam’s face.

“Who,” Sam managed. “Is this—who is it?”

“Sam, it’s _me_. It’s—”

“... _Charlie_?”

“Isn’t it freaky?” she babbled. “I mean, I just woke up and I was in _Iowa_ of all places but in the middle of nowhere, and I didn’t have my phone or my laptop or wallet anything and I had no idea where I was and I couldn’t find—anyway, I prayed to Cas just on the off-chance and he turned up a few hours later like some kind of white knight in a stolen car and looking honestly kinda the worse for wear, and—and _Sam_ , we’re at the bunker now and she was just—look, not that I don’t want you here just because I really _really_ want to see you again but believe me, you _really_ need to get here, now. I just. You won’t believe me if I tell you and you _need_ to be here, okay? Sam?”

“I...” croaked Sam. “ _Charlie_?”

“You doofus,” she said, with a trembling kind of laugh. “Just get here, okay? Cas, he needs to get here, right?”

Castiel’s voice rumbled some agreement in the background; then Sam was left staring down at the cell in his hands, with his heart and blood racing for very different reasons.

“I thought,” said Gabriel, smirking, levering himself up into a sitting position and adjusting the impressive hard-on in his lap with no shame, “that _someone_ said he was all gung-ho about people coming back from the dead these days.”

Sam lifted his head and looked at him. He was fairly sure the room was shaking.

“Not family,” he said. “Not _family_ , Gabriel. We don’t get that.”

Gabriel’s eyes were deep and bright and grave, though his mouth was laughing still; and he lifted a hand, hesitated a moment, then laid it on Sam’s cheek. It didn’t feel like affection, somehow: more like a benediction. A beat, and he lifted the other one—held Sam’s face steady between them—lifted himself to his knees, and pressed a chaste kiss to Sam’s forehead.

“Go get in the car,” he said, “you sap. I’ll grab the bags.”

 

***

 

It was dark by the time the Impala began to grumble along the track toward the bunker. Gabriel had been texting Castiel back and forth from Sam’s phone, so that Castiel and—and _Charlie_ , God—knew when they were approaching.

So it was that, as the sweep of the Impala’s beams curved across the bunker door, Sam glimpsed it open and a couple of figures step out. He’d only just cut the engine and climbed out when a tiny red-headed bundle of trembling energy collided with him and did her best to squeeze out his breath. He crushed her so hard she squeaked, laughing—buried his face in her hair and tried to say half a dozen things that he forgot before he finished them—breathed in the smell of her shampoo and the bunker’s soap, kissed her hair, whispered the most abject and terrible of apologies and thanks to her and to whoever was responsible for this miracle.

Somewhere in the background he heard the murmur of Castiel’s voice, and Gabriel’s. Then a silence from Gabriel that somehow felt stunned; then his drawling chatter, “Honour to meet you, ma’am, big fan of your later work. Knew another lady of the same name, good PR, didn’t deliver so much in my opinion. Hey, Sammy kid? You might want to finish up over there and have a good stiff drink.”

Sam disentangled himself by blinking degrees from Charlie’s clinging, delighted touch. She was staring up at him, breathless and tentatively and beaming with some kind of anxious promise.

She was nodding past him, and squeezing her hands on his arms, and beaming her widest fangirl smile.

Sam turned around.

_Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time._

Sam heard the familiar meaningful meaningless words in his head, spoken with Dean’s laughing voice.

“... Mom?” he said.

Time tangled itself, back and forth, and Sam was a child again.

The rest was silence.

Somewhere, a bird called: _Poo-tee-weet?_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Don't be melodramatic, Sam. You get Dean and Castiel back from the dead all the time!


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oops. i decided it needs another chapter. for balance reasons.

Sam crawled into bed somewhere around two in the morning. Charlie had crashed at ten, Gabriel not long after. Mary had kept Castiel by her for a while—Sam suspected she had worked out as much in the space of a few hours about Castiel’s feelings for Dean as Sam knew from years of painful third-wheeling—but at last Castiel had retired too. And then it had been just Sam, and... Mom.

It was so weird to think of her with that name. Sam sort of felt like he hadn’t earned it. Not like Dean had.

When he flicked on the lamp, he found Gabriel asleep on his bed. The wings—unsplinted since Castiel had healed the bones, held at a more natural angle since Castiel had run his grace through Gabriel’s muscles to give him the unnatural strength to support the unnatural weight—folded low over his back, warm shades of bronze and chestnut in the half-light.

Gabriel made a vague noise of complaint, and cracked one eye open.

“Well, you _could_ have taken one of the other rooms,” Sam pointed out, and pulled off his shirt.

Gabriel stopped complaining. “Y’r bed was ‘ready made up. ‘Sides, this is where all the cool archangels hang out.”

“Sheets haven’t been changed for three weeks.”

“Yes they have.” Gabriel grinned, lop-sided on the pillow. “Freshly laundered. With _lemon_. And mint.”

Sam paused in the process of undoing his jeans, and gaped.

“... I think I just had my first ever teenage panic about what my mom might have found while she was cleaning my room,” he said, after a minute. “Shit. This is weird.”

Gabriel lifted his eyebrows. “Don’t let it distract you from more important things.”

Sam bitch-faced at him, and turned around to pull his jeans off and grab a pair of tracksuit pants from the drawer.

Gabriel made a sleepy, appreciative noise behind him. When Sam turned back, he found the nearest wing half-lifted in invitation.

Sam clambered into bed—carefully, because it wasn’t _that_ big. The sheets were folded differently to how he always did it.

“So, Sam Winchester,” said Gabriel, and smirked. “No family back from the dead, huh?”

Sam smiled the wondering, bewildered smile that had seemed stuck on his face all evening, and shook his head without a word.

“Besides.” The wing settled over him with a silky rustle. “How many times have you got Dean back? And Cas. Drama queen.”

Sam slipped his fingers between the feathers, and closed his eyes. “Shut up. Tell me that when I wake up this will still be true.”

“What do I know about truth anymore?”

“ _Gabriel_.”

“Fine.” Gabriel laid his hand on Sam’s belly, nudged at his shoulder in a way that was almost but not quite a nuzzle, and settled down on the pillow. “Go to sleep, little boy. You mom’s asleep down the hall, and angels are watching over you.”

“You’re a dick.”

“Guilty.”

 

***

 

 _Earlier_.

Sam dragged Charlie into the kitchen.

“You’re telling her to read _these_ books?” he hissed, waving a copy of _Changing Channels_ in her face.

“Hey, give me some credit.” She snatched it back. “And go easy, that’s a signed first edition. Um. I mean. I guess. Signed by _God_.” Her eyes went wide, and she stared down at the book in her hand for a minute. “Does that make it a relic? Or a bible? or—uh.” She looked up into Sam’s unimpressed face, and beamed innocently. “Trust me, okay? I’m only giving her the highlights. The basic overview of the plot ones. No filler episodes. Or any of the ones where you’re full frontal. Which she agreed with, bee-tee-dubs—doesn’t want to read about either of you doing the dirty. Which _means_ that... um. A lot of the ones with you and Ruby... not there.”

Sam closed his eyes, and silently cursed at the ceiling.

“Thank you,” he said grudgingly after he’d counted to twenty. “I think.”

Charlie patted his chest. “Trust me to pick the hero episodes, not the morally dubious ones.”

“Ugh,” Sam complained. “And it’s still weird that you’ve read all those.”

“If it helps,” she said cheerfully, “the trope of the flawed hero makes you look all the more—”

“Please stop.”

 

***

 

“We were having a... housecleaning spree,” said Castiel carefully.

Gabriel snickered. “She roped you into that?”

“I left them to it,” said Charlie happily. “They were sweet.”

Castiel frowned. “I find it soothing.”

Gabriel coughed something like “suck-up!” behind his hand. Mary smiled pleasantly at him, then looked pointedly in Sam’s direction.

“Oh hey!” said Gabriel brightly. “Who wants beer? Time for beer! I’ll go get beer. Yes. Beer.”

Sam got very thoughtful. Castiel looked at him, and got his ‘help I feel like I might be lying’ face, and looked away.

 

***

 

“I, um,” said Sam to Castiel, in a quiet moment in the kitchen. “I figured out why it’s those two. Charlie, and... and Mom.”

Castiel said nothing, but he looked curious, and he looked sympathetic, and he took the dishcloth from Sam’s hands.

“When I talked to Amara,” Sam said, “I talked mostly about family. About how they never stop being your family, even if they’re gone. And I talked about Mom, and... and Charlie. About how shitty I felt about what I did to Charlie. And also about... well, about that time Charlie got split into dark-Charlie and light-Charlie, and how she thought at first she had to kill her dark self but it turned out she had to reconcile with her. And Amara listened. She’s... she actually comes across as really innocent, you know? Like, she’s terrifying, but she just really wants to know how things work, and she would believe anything you told her.”

Castiel nodded, frowning, and kept on saying nothing, which was sort of his superpower—drawing you out.

“And before she and Chuck vanished,” Sam went on, frowning at the casserole dish he was putting away, “she said she wanted to thank me. To give me what I wanted. So I figure... that was Mom—for the family part—and Charlie, to say... that I was right. That that was what she needed. What _they_ needed. Do you think?”

“I don’t know how she thinks,” said Castiel. “But whatever the reason, I’m... I am glad.”

“Yeah,” said Sam, and smiled. “Me too. And about more than that, Cas. I’m—I missed you, okay?”

Castiel blinked at him, as if this sentiment honestly puzzled him.

“Cas,” said Sam slowly. “You _do_ know that, right? That we... that you’re _meant_ to be here, with me and Dean?”

Castiel looked away.

“It’s... very kind of you to offer that, Sam.”

He sounded sad.

“Screw offering,” said Sam, and stepped in, and squeezed his arm. “ _Cas_. There’s nothing to offer. It is what it is. You’re family, okay? Believe me, Dean thinks so too. Maybe even more than me. You belong _here_ , with us, wherever that is.”

“Oh,” said Castiel quietly, with centuries of meaning behind it. And he still didn’t believe it.

“Okay,” said Sam; and dragged him into a hug, giving no quarter. “Okay. We’ll work on that.”

 

***

 

“Men of Letters,” Mary said scornfully. “Hidebound sycophants with no clue what it’s like to be out there against a real enemy.”

“Well,” said Sam, with half a smile, “they did have a nice set-up. Sure helped us. You didn’t know that Dad’s father was a Man of Letters?”

“Honestly,” Mary said drily, “it explains a lot.”

Then she sighed.

“Sam, I am... so sorry. For many things. But the thing that I’m most sorry about today—no, scratch that. I’m angry.”

Sam couldn’t help cringing a bit.

“I’m angry that your father raised you how he did. You boys, you should never have been hunters. And then John Winchester just pulls you into that life, without any contacts, any experience, any—you should all have been dead long ago. And—Sam, I’m sorry. Because if it hadn’t been for me, for the hints he heard or found of my life, he probably would never have believed all that, about demons. It would have been... arsonist, lunatic, chance. I don’t know. But I’m sorry. And I’m furious.”

Her hair was twisted up behind her head, and she was wearing white and red, and her eyes were steady and as hard as ever their father’s had been. But there was a warmth in there too; and when John had looked like that, he had seemed to look right through you, or to look at you like he’d look at his gun or car or bottle of holy water, and _she_ looked at you like she saw you.

“You...” she said quietly; “Sam. My boy. You were... so tiny, when last I saw you. There was nothing I would not have done to protect you. You don’t know until you feel it, how... how _vicious_ that feeling is, when you hold a little squirming child against your heart and he looks up at you, and... And now here you are.” She laughed, a little, gestured up and down the length of his body, shook her head as if she thought she was silly.

“But John—I didn’t trust him, not really. Not for... oh, almost two years before that. But I loved him. And of _course_ he took you, that baby, and he made you into...”

Sam had nothing to say. She fell silent. Her hands were gripped too tight around that beer mug.

“My fault,” she said quietly, “and his. Sins of the parents, I suppose. You know, I died just under a day ago. To me. You were that small... less than twenty-four hours ago. I _fed_ you. I held you, and... and now he has broken you. So quickly. He has done everything that I always swore my children would never suffer.”

Sam reached out, and took her hand. He couldn’t stop looking at the shape of her face, the way she moved her eyes and her shoulders.

“Mom,” he said softly, “Mom. I’m not broken.”

And never for ten years had he believed it so much as he did in that moment.

“Well,” she said briskly. “If _they’ve_ got Dean—especially the _English_ Men of Letters—the worst they’ll be doing is talking at him, and trying to convince him of the error of his ways. Now, tell me about this Rowena.”

Sam looked up at her. “I... Mom,” he said. “I love you. Is that weird? I know I shouldn’t say that, because I—I don’t actually know you at all. I don’t get to have that. But... I don’t know. I don’t get it. I _do_.”

Her eyes went full, and deep, and wondering.

“Oh, my boy,” she said softly, and reached out to touch. “I loved you with everything I had before I even met you. Sometimes these things, they don’t need to be explained. They come in the blood.”

 

***

 

 _Now_.

When Sam woke up, he found himself nuzzling into Gabriel’s hair.

Gabriel was sprawled across his chest, wings outstretched across the bed, one thigh snug between Sam’s, cock plump in the groove of his hip. Sam’s arms had settled themselves around Gabriel’s back and waist, and Gabriel’s rumbling half-snore was huffing sleepy breaths across his neck.

One of Gabriel’s hands was curled around Sam’s bicep. It felt... possessive. Firm. Good.

Sam was... really, really hard.

He exhaled as softly as he could into Gabriel’s hair, and felt that slow, inevitable falling that you sometimes feel when not quite awake, in bed. Only this time he knew what he was falling into.

He ran a hand up Gabriel’s back; buried it in sleep-warm feathers; and let the nuzzling turn into slow, open-mouthed kisses.

Gabriel’s breath kept on for a while, steady and deep; then it hitched a little; then it seemed to be forced deliberately into the same steady rhythm, too tidy, too predictable.

Sam slid his other hand up to comb leisurely and firm through Gabriel’s hair. Because he’d noticed what _that_ did for Gabriel, oh yes.

Gabriel shivered, from his head to where his left foot was wedged under Sam’s calf.

... Gabriel was _Sam’s_.

The knowledge rose up from deep inside him, vicious and hot. No reason to it, no prior warning. Nothing like it had been with Lucifer, after that possession. This angel, this one here, this _person_ —he was Sam’s. To have and to hold and to warm and to help. To fight, and to fuck. 

Sam gave in, and let himself fall.

Gabriel turned his head, just a little. His mouth opened, hot and wet and clever, against the curve of Sam’s throat.

Sam swore, and his foot jumped, and he smacked his head back into the pillow.

The hand on Sam’s hip turned to _intent_. One little finger slid straight and sure under the waistband of his tracksuits.

Sam tightened his fingers, too firm, in the silky gold-brown locks. Gabriel groaned, and teeth flickered against Sam’s neck. He shoved his other hand through feathers, against delicate skin, against the grain, and felt Gabriel’s response.

But Sam was more than his instincts, his blood.

Gabriel’s mouth curved against Sam’s most delicate skin.

“Say _yes_ , Sam.”

Sam half laughed.

“Because that always works out so well.” Fingers knotted around feathers, twisted just enough to irritate, stroked just enough to soothe. Sam nuzzled at his hairline, slid his cock luxuriously against skin through flannel. “Gabriel. C’mon up here.”

Gabriel came reluctantly; but Sam urged him on up until they were nose to nose, Sam cradling the side of his face, Gabriel’s breath heavy against his cheek.

“No,” Sam said softly, and looked straight into his eyes. “Not like this.”

Something in the depths of that glowing gold faltered, and was shielded. On the surface, all that happened was that Gabriel lifted one eyebrow.

_Because, like this, you can pretend it means nothing. And you are too good at that._

Sam didn’t say that.

“Kiss me first,” he said. “Promise me a week, a month.”

Gabriel’s mouth stretched into a grin. “Oh, kid,” he purred, and nudged in against Sam’s half-open mouth. “I’d promise you the world, right now.”

Which made Sam’s heart swoop and sicken, because it was the least promising of promises; but he growled, and dug his fingers into the back of Gabriel’s neck, and swallowed the gasp and the purr, and slid his other hand down and shoved it beyond the waistband to grip hard at the soft, well-remembered mounds of flesh beyond.

Gabriel’s body was as hot and as welcoming and as furious and as teasing as Sam remembered it. It was no more satisfying.

But the sex _was_ good. And now and then, during the day, there was the promise of something more. When Gabriel forgot himself.

 

***

 

They made a good team, Gabriel and Sam and Charlie and Castiel and... and Mom. Sam was actually kind of awed by it all.

And _she_ was... amazing. And gave Sam a centre he’d never known he’d missed. And absolutely terrified him too. And also Gabriel, he was pretty sure. She and Gabriel challenged and fascinated each other in equal measure, and if Sam found the bed empty in the middle of the night and wandered out to the kitchen he was as likely to find them in the middle of a passionate argument as cackling maniacally over something they’d never explain.

But Castiel adored her.

Sam couldn’t wait to see Dean’s face. So obviously they had to find him.

 

***

 

And they did. Five weeks and three minor cases and two international plane flights and ten near-death experiences later. There were tears and laughing and stories and wonder, and everybody learning a hell of a lot from everybody else.

Two days after that—and perhaps Mary had something to do with it, or perhaps it was just another end-of-the-world averted only this time with the promise of a _forever_ in it—Dean took a deep breath, and put his hand on Castiel’s shoulder, and kissed him, so quickly you’d hardly have noticed, then tried to laugh it off. But Castiel noticed; and Castiel got his fighting-battles-of-ages look on, and balled his fists in Dean’s shirt, and kissed him. And Castiel didn’t laugh; and then, neither did Dean.

(Charlie did. She whistled, too.)

And the next morning, Gabriel was gone.


	9. Epilogue

_Eight months later_.

When the doorbell rang, Castiel didn’t raise his head; but an aura of smugness spread out from where he sat primly at the table.

“Huh?” Dean blinked at him. “But I got it last ti— _oh_.”

Sam groaned, and thumped his head against his book. Mary looked up over the board game she was playing with Charlie, and shrugged, with a fond smile. Dean’s cheeks were pink, but his grin was practically a leer.

“On it,” said Dean, and winked, and practically _bounced_ up toward the door. And why Sam had thought they would be any _less_ disgusting once they were having sex all the time he didn’t know.

... It was Gabriel at the door.

Dean punched him in the nose.

“Ow,” said Gabriel. “Mind the profile, Rambo.”

“That felt good,” Dean commented, as Sam rose slowly to his feet in the war room below, ears buzzing. “And you’re still not juiced up. Awesome. The hell kind of business you think you’ve got here, doucheface?”

“Not heaven or hell, porridgebrains,” said Gabriel, patting his chest. “You _do_ remember how we made that truce, right? Oh, hey there, Majesty, how’s the shadow-forest of Encadir coming along?”

Sam turned, and left.

 

***

 

There was a vast hangar down on one of the lower levels—because of _course_ the Men of Letters had had a hangar, though Dean grouched every so often because they hadn’t left any aircraft in it—and now it was a garden.

It was Sam’s and Castiel’s, mostly, though Dean had done a lot of the landscaping, and he did keep fiddling with the herbs and the compost heaps. It had a sprinkler system already installed, in case of fire, and Dean and Charlie together had replaced the lights on the overhead rig with others of the right warmth and intensity, and put it all on a timer to give the plants a diurnal cycle. Sam had figured out the right soil types (with some tips from Mary about what grew best with what and which vegetables needed most feeding), and he and Castiel had bought a few truckloads of earth and mulch—which Castiel, with his gradually healing wings, had transported straight into the depths of the bunker. Then there was terracing, and boulders, and Charlie enthusiastically drawing up Moondor-style maps of how they should lay it out, with winding paths between the plants that would grow the tallest to create a sense of depth and mystery, and even a young apple tree where the soil lay deepest.

But the nurturing, the making things grow, coaxing life from the earth and watching them strengthen and stretch, and finding some kind of peace in it—that was Sam and Castiel.

It was a long-term project. Because they had time, now. Sam planned to be around in a few months when these chilli seedlings were ready to fruit, in a year to move the tomatoes to a new bed to prevent disease. He was considering the long, involved process of making an asparagus bed; and he meant eventually to see the apple tree yield enough fruit for an apple pie. He wanted to see it grow tall and gnarled, and strong.

He gathered a few eggplants and tomatoes; put them in the kitchen basket; poked at the silverbeet and decided that it was big enough to start planting the next crop; went and combed through the converted file-card cabinet that served them for a seed bank and found the right envelope; went back and knelt down, patting the soil flat, pressing little indentations just the right distance apart with his thumb, settling the fine seeds two or three to a spot and tucking them in.

When he went for the watering can Gabriel was leaning in the door, looking around the vast space that smelled of living earth.

“So, your mom said you’d either be in the garden or the firing range,” he said. “Since it’s this one, I guess that means you’re not going to shoot me if I step inside.”

Sam shrugged. “Depends. Anybody else hit you?”

“Charlie did.” Gabriel smirked. “Then she hugged me. Castiel just put on that ‘I forgive you but you are a terrible disappointment’ face, but he wears that most of the time, so.” He pushed off the door, hands in pockets, and trailed after Sam up the long, shallow steps made of flagstones. “Also your mom offered me tea, which was terrifying. Especially seeing as how she doesn’t drink tea.”

“Make yourself useful,” said Sam, and nudged the kitchen basket with one toe. “See if there’s any more squash hiding under those leaves. Don’t step on the lettuce seedlings.”

“Should get some little birds in here,” Gabriel said, tipping his head back and turning around in the path to take in the whole of the space. “Gardens need birds. Some nesting boxes, a bird feeder...”

Sam snorted, in spite of himself. “He’s been here a minute and already he’s teaming up with Charlie.”

“Huh?”

“She wants goats. Or rabbits. Animals in general.”

“Don’t tell me _you_ don’t.”

“Maybe,” said Sam. “I...”

But this wasn’t Gabriel’s business, not now, no matter how engagingly he cocked his eyebrow or how soft and knowing the curl at the corner of his mouth. Not the worry Sam felt about the idea of looking after something that could remember and hurt and suffer, that depended so completely on him. Garden first—just that, for now. Once he’d proved that his hands _could_ bring life, _could_ make it work... maybe then. Maybe.

Gabriel sank to one knee in the midst of the squash thicket, easy and fluid, his movements quick and gentle as he brushed aside the broad umbrellas of leaves to peek beneath them for the dark green fruits. Sam couldn’t help watching him out of the corner of his eye as he watered the new seeds, knowing the agility and the cunning and the tenderness of those fingers; and Gabriel made no secret of watching him.

“Soooo, how’s it going,” asked Gabriel, like he was best friends with the elephant in the room—“living with people who aren’t Dean?”

Sam smiled, despite himself. “You know what’s only just started to be funny instead of freaky? The fact that Mom’s, like, ten years younger than us. I mean, aside from the whole years in Hell thing. She’s actually Charlie’s age. Which is even weirder, because Charlie’s like our little sister and then _they_ act like sisters, and...”

“Huh.”

“What?”

“Nothing.” And there it was: the irritating smirk of knowing more than you.

Sam rolled his eyes at it. “She’s started doing things like... get this, last Thursday? She and Charlie were going for a girls’ night out and Mom dressed up like... like a girl of twenty-nine would nowadays, y’know? Like she was trying to look _sexy_. Like...” He made vague, embarrassed shapes in the air with his hands. “Cleavage, and... _gorgeous_ hair. And Dean kind of flatlined. Which I’m pretty sure is why she did it, to get back at him for trying to pull the ‘elders and betters’ line on her the day before.”

Gabriel cackled. “He’s got over the reverently stunned mullet phase, then?”

“Uh, kinda? Sometimes. I think he’s still putting out feelers. Trying to work out how to actually talk to her as... you know, how we _are_ together. And still be _him_ , like he is in his everyday life. Because all his life she’s been this... well, _angel_ , and...”

The caution reasserted itself, the wall that he had built over the last few months against the idea that _Gabriel isn’t coming back_. Against the trust that had so cautiously began to grow before that—against the idea that he deserved any kind of happy ending.

Against letting Gabriel into his family.

“Anyway,” he said, off-hand, “Dean and Cas do most of the hunting now. So they’re away a fair bit. Charlie goes off to do her own thing sometimes, but she and Mom and I, we’ve got this whole hunting database started—still a lot of work to go, but there’s some people in the other Men of Letters cells chipping in—plus Mom is liaising with them and kicking their arses, and she and I and Garth are starting to pull together the sort of thing Bobby had going with being an emergency call-centre and reference point for hunters—and it doesn’t hurt that we _are_ the centre of the mainland States, and Charlie and Claire and I have started to set up a scanner thing that _should_ pick up on potential reports of things that might be supernatural in weird articles and patterns in local areas’ history that might be important, and...”

Gabriel was smiling a bit, soft and private. Not at all like the runaway slinking back, asking for forgiveness. Not like an old friend catching up. Like someone who had always had a right to be here, always would, and could never doubt it.

“So,” Sam said, pointedly polite. “Speaking of tracking things. How’s _tricks_?”

Gabriel’s eyes crinkled at the edges—still not a trace of bitterness or sarcasm. “You noticed that, huh?”

Sam shrugged, and turned away to tie some of the tomatoes higher up their stakes. “Was honestly kinda impressed you’re managing to be _Trickster_ enough to turn up on our radar without powers.”

“What can I say? I’m just that good.”

“Yeah, but you _weren’t_. You relied on all that shit. Alternate realities, impossibly larger-than-life, surround-sound special effects.”

Without looking, he felt Gabriel shrug. “Creativity works with what it’s got.”

A tiny branch of new growth broke under Sam’s suddenly harsh fingers.

“What are you doing here, Gabriel.”

“Chatting?”

“You just come waltzing back in and expect, what?”

“... Booty call?”

“Try again.” Sam rounded on him, righteous and _angry_ ; but he was wrong-footed. Because instead of the defensive sneer and snark he’d expected, Gabriel was just crouched there, watching him, half laughing and half sad; and for once, for _once_ , he wasn’t hiding.

“Hey, Winchester,” he said, almost gently: “not your pet.”

“ _Why_?” snarled Sam, all the words and fury stored up inside. “You said—the _things_ you said, the things you let me believe—but you were always at a distance, weren’t you? You never actually _gave_ anything at all, you just let me think that almost now, almost tomorrow, I _might_ begin to—”

Gabriel blinked rapidly, and frowned, faltering for the first time. Like he was reassessing. But Sam didn’t stop.

“And okay, I know you’re _hurt_. I know you’ve spent centuries or—hell, _millennia—_ thinking that whatever you do and choose is right by definition and that everyone has to play along in the little games you make up, but you know what? We’re all hurt. We’re all damaged goods here. And when it comes to actually relating to other people in your life, which we _were_? You don’t get to do that to people. That’s not okay. “

“Sam,” said Gabriel, carefully.

“No,” said Sam. “Look, you know what? I wasn’t in love. I realised that early on.” And he watched Gabriel’s face sideways as he said it, saw how studiously it didn’t change. “Maybe I would have been, soon. But I _trusted_ you, and that’s worth more. For me. You didn’t even call, Gabriel.”

“Why call?” Gabriel dropped his eyes, and twisted another squash carefully from its tendril. “You obviously knew what I was doing. I knew what _you_ were doing—Dean prayed, after you stopped, mostly to yell at me. Charlie too, now and then—less yelling there.”

Sam stopped, breathing heavily, deeply.

“Verité pour verité,” he said. “I’m calling it in.”

Gabriel laughed, almost nervously. “What?”

“I know you remember that. You wouldn’t say my French was crap just because I said _masseuse_ once.”

“Hey. I can be _very_ judgemental.”

Sam just lifted an eyebrow, and got sarcastic. “One truth for another. _Angel_.”

Gabriel looked up at him under his lashes, old and certain, and he shrugged. “Go ahead. I’ll answer.”

And even just that took Sam’s breath away, just for a moment. But then he set down the watering can, and glowered down at Gabriel.

“So. That first time. Before you died. When you came to me, and demanded a deal. Why did you ask for _sex_ as payment?”

Gabriel exhaled, straightened up slowly, rocked back and forth on his feet, stuck his hands in his pockets and looked down at a baby chilli plant next to his toe.

“... Huh.”

Sam crossed his arms. “What? Thinking of a way out of it?”

“Nope. Just... not the freebie I thought you’d go for.”

“What did you think I was going to say?”

Gabriel sat down on a big mossy boulder, behind the straggling mint, and pulled off the amulet over his head. His wings unfolded into visibility around his shoulders, settling broad and glossy and rich in the air around him.

“The obvious,” he said, and smiled: a warm ironic curve of the mouth, tugging irritably at those parts of Sam that remembered _liking_ him, simply and easily. “Why I left.”

“What would you have said?”

Gabriel put his elbows on his knees; knitted his hands together and rested his chin on them, watching Sam with eyes that were frank and golden and deep.

“You know,” he said, in that easy self-deprecating tone that Sam had always found irresistible, “you break your arm and they put a cast on it, right? So then, give it a month or two and they take it off and the muscle’s turned to jelly and your arm looks like a stick. Like it’s forgotten how to be an arm. And if you kept the cast on long enough it’d just... evaporate. Probably.”

“I don’t think that’s how it works.”

“Especially,” added Gabriel cautiously, but without dropping his eyes away, and without laughing, “when the cast in question was one the arm had been mooning over for years, even without actually really knowing them.”

Sam’s breath hitched. Then he brushed the dirt on his hands off against his jeans. “That metaphor got weird.”

“All the best metaphors do.” Gabriel winked. “I’m not made to stay in one place, kid. I needed to leave, to remember how to be me.”

“You couldn’t say that upfront?”

Gabriel’s grin spread across his face, impish and irresistible. “Figured you’d want to be angry first.”

Sam pointed at him. “Don’t start.”

Gabriel held up his hands, innocent, and didn’t stop grinning.

“Verité, remember?” said Sam, stern as he could while his heart seemed to clench at the laughter in Gabriel’s eyes.

“Why sex?” Gabriel shrugged. “Another backup plan, before I got in on the war. Investment. I had about four dozen half-failsafes and maybe-fallbacks, and, well, that was another of them. The seed of a powerful soul who I knew would _have_ to be alive for the final showdown, as an ingredient for... well, I couldn’t pass that up.”

“Uh-huh,” said Sam, eyeing him closely. “Not love?”

Gabriel shrugged. “Hardly knew you.”

“But you did. You’d studied me for years. Hell, you _stalked_ me. You played me.”

“Hardly _knew_ you,” said Gabriel, hard and gentle at the same time. “Not like I learned to know you.”

“That’s not fair,” said Sam. “That’s just fucking manipulative, Gabriel.”

Gabriel spread his fingers, and grinned. “What can I say? It really _was_ all about your trouser snake.”

“Castiel told me,” Sam snapped. “Just before you left. He _said_ that you were in love with me.”

“... That little shit.”

“ _Gabriel_.”

“What?”

“Well?”

Gabriel rolled his eyes. “Hardly an actual motivation, now, is it? So insufferably _human_ , ranking love above everything else, prizing _eros_ above all other loves. As if there were no other stories in the multiverse. No other reasons.”

“Give me a reason, then,” said Sam quietly, after one tiny endless moment. Because Gabriel had answered his question. He had looked at Sam, as he spoke; and in that look, he had confessed.

“I gave you a reason, and it was true.”

“Was it all the truth?”

“No, but the rest would sound like Jean Valjean ‘leave them for their own good’ crap and you wouldn’t believe it of me. So, verité: why did _you_ come for me.”

“Huh?” Sam blinked.

Because, after all, the whole ‘truth’ thing had been Gabriel’s idea in the first place, even if he _had_ been mostly asleep. Which meant there had been something he really wanted to know, and _that_?

“I told you. Straight off. To help me find Dean and Cas, and because I didn’t want to let you down when you were on our team.”

“ _Whole_ truth.”

“What, like the kind you gave me just now? What makes you think there’s gotta be something more?”

Gabriel made a soft noise like wonder, and fell silent. But the light in his eyes that always gave so much away was piercing, and almost entirely veiled.

Sam sat down, folded himself wearily onto the fallen oak that Castiel had dragged in two weeks back, and ran his hands through his hair.

“That why you stuck around, huh,” he said. “Because you thought there was some... some hidden motive.”

Gabriel shrugged.

Sam looked at the dirt, at the dark scattered mounds between his toes.

“Because you thought I loved you back?” he said, too quietly.

Gabriel scoffed, too quick and too harsh. “I never thought that, Sam. Believe me.”

“Gabriel—”

“Don’t.”

“No,” said Sam: lifted his head and glared, but this time it wasn’t in anger. “Look. _Gabriel_. Do you know how long it’s been since I figured out how to love anybody? I mean, even Dean, it’s this—this _fact of life_ , and half the time, the last ten years or so? We didn’t even like each other. It’s just _I have to save him_ and _I can’t exist without him_. Jess was—I don’t know. That was long ago. But I’m working on it, okay? With Mom, and with Dean. I need to. And I can’t promise you that. Just—”

He took a deep breath, didn’t look away, and said other words that he’d rehearsed to himself in his head, now and then, when he hadn’t been angry.

“I was scared,” he said, “at first. The way I felt drawn to you. The fascination. The way I felt like I... lit up, around you. The way you made the world seem more alive. More interesting. Even when you weren’t there.”

Gabriel was very still, saying nothing.

“I thought,” said Sam carefully, “that it was a hangover from the possession thing. That I wasn’t really _me_ anymore. Haven’t been for years, after all. Maybe all of my life. I don’t know what it is to be alive and _feeling_ without influence, Gabriel, without some supernatural _thing_ tagging along or hiding in my blood or lurking behind my brain. But... look. It’s the opposite with Lucifer. So.”

Gabriel lifted his head.

“It’s you,” said Sam. “I’m not _in_ love. But. I want to get to know you. I really do. Everything about you... makes the world feel more alive, for me. I want to ask you questions for days, or... hell, just listen to you talk about whatever you want to talk about. I. I don’t know. I didn’t really plan what to say beyond that. Kinda figured someone would have kissed someone by now. Or thrown a punch.”

Gabriel’s face was unreadable.

“So,” said Sam. “Why’d you come back?”

Gabriel shrugged. “Your brother’s apple pie?”

“I can still throw that punch.”

“I came back,” said Gabriel, “to see how you were. Not expecting...”

“Hoping?”

“... Maybe.”

“You might have _called_.”

“Yeah.” And for the first time in minutes, his face relaxed, and the corners of his eyes tipped into a smile. “Yeah, I should’ve. And I’m sorry.”

Sam stood up. “You. You’re admitting that.”

Gabriel shrugged, and the corner of his mouth twitched. “What can I say? I get possessive. Don’t like to see my favourite toys broken.”

Sam advanced on him. “You little shit.”

“Guilty.” Gabriel’s grin spread across his face, bright and joyous and dirty. “You realise I’m contractually obliged to suggest a threesome with your brother.”

“Shut up.”

“Or Cas, hey, I could go for—”

“ _On your knees_.”

Gabriel’s eyes went dark, and wide, and he slipped off the rock at once and landed full on both knees in the earth. The scent of crushed mint rose around them both as Sam stood in front of him, feet apart, and touched his upturned face.

This was a game they played, sometimes: because Gabriel, taking orders and loving it, was a breathtaking thing. So just with this, Sam was acknowledging that Gabriel wouldn’t be turned out into the cold tonight, wouldn’t be in an unfamiliar room in the bunker—he would be in Sam’s bed, and there would be sex.

But that wasn’t all he had to say.

Sam went to his knees too.

Gabriel’s hands were firm and tight on his thighs, and Sam put his there too, just touching the backs of Gabriel’s palms.

“It’s been... one of us, then the other,” he said, frowning. “With the power, I mean. No balance. And if even Light and Dark need to sort that shit out, well...?”

“Samuel Winchester,” said Gabriel, with deep and teasing reverence, “are you actually offering to bottom for once?”

Sam narrowed his eyes. “... Actually, yes, I was going to end up there. But that wasn’t the _point_.”

“I can make it the point,” said Gabriel, in his deep and serious messenger-of-God voice. “I can demonstrate the point to you at length. I can make you feel it, _deeply_.”

“... Thanks for that.”

“ _Sam_ ,” said Gabriel, and he meant it.

He slipped his fingers into Sam’s hair, and his other hand around Sam’s waist, and rested his forehead against Sam’s, and just... breathed. Like somebody who hasn’t breathed right for a very long time.

Sam slipped his hands into the warm folds between wing and body, and held on.

“I don’t understand,” he mumbled after a while, into the warm shuff of breath on breath, “why you would... why it matters.”

“Why it matters?”

“Why you’d... focus on me.”

He _felt_ Gabriel’s mouth curl into a smirk. “Focus on you, dearest of moosificators?”

“You’re going to make me say it, aren’t you,” Sam growled; and Gabriel laughed as quietly as possible for him, and turned his head, and kissed Sam quickly and thoroughly.

“I am.”

“Why _you love me_.”

“Because, you mealy-brained sack of potatoes, it has nothing to do with me. You don’t actually know what _desire_ is at all, do you? It’s not about the getting. It’s not about me at all. It’s about you being the most awesome and _human_ and impossibly magnificent man I’ve ever met and it being impossible not to want to stare at that in adoration and also ride its dick until the end of time.”

Sam kissed him back, to avoid words and laughter. Gabriel shoved his hands unceremoniously up under Sam’s shirt and danced over all the ticklish spots on his ribs until Sam squirmed and shoved at him, burying his face in Gabriel’s neck, gasping and laughing. Gabriel kissed over his cheek, and eye, and temple, and ear, and neck, and Sam brushed fingers through his hair and feathers until his breath came in gasps and broken-off purrs.

“I feel like this conversation isn’t done,” he confessed in a mumble against Gabriel’s collar.

“’Cos you haven’t yelled at me enough? Or because I haven’t gone all traumatised at the way you keep rubbing in the whole unequal affections thing?”

Sam squirmed a bit, and tugged Gabriel in with warm and eager hands on his body. “Doesn’t it bother you? I mean, it will sometime, right?”

Gabriel shrugged. “Kid, nobody’s ever loved me back. I’ve never loved anybody, not with all of me. Castiel might have been too optimistic, who gives a shit. _I wanna get to know you_ is a better proposition than I ever heard and I’m all in. For as long as we’re both around to enjoy it.”

“Okay,” said Sam, and pressed Gabriel back against the oak log, nosing at his neck. “Okay, so. Hi, Gabriel. I’m Sam Winchester.”

Gabriel snickered, while slipping disbelievingly gentle fingers into Sam’s collar. “Hi, Sam Winchester. You must be from Tennessee, because you’re the only ten I–”

“Did it hurt when you fell from Heaven?” asked Sam, deadpan, and earned a punch to the ribs. “Ow. Are you religious? because you’re the answer to all my prayers. _Ow_. You’re like a candy bar, half sweet and half nuts.”

“Okay, that one’s fair.”

“I thought so.”

“Kiss me again.”

“... You know I’ve got a bed, right?”

“No,” Gabriel growled, and Sam found himself all of a sudden pressed back against the oak trunk with an archangel in his lap, the wings arched and quivering around them in all their strength and weakness, their humanity and divinity. “No, I think this is a good place. A good tree. Perfect size to bend you over and lick you open.”

“... I haven’t bottomed in six years, Gabriel.”

“Trust me, it’ll work.” Gabriel winked. “I’m the Trickster.”

 

***

 

(It did.)

 

***

 

Sometime in the small hours—once they’d eventually moved to bed—they were woken by somebody clearing their throat, and saying, “Um, guys? Hi, I just... thought I’d drop by? Is this a bad time?”

Unseen by either of them, the old brass amulet in Sam’s bedside table was glowing white and hot.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Stay tuned - there is going to be a Charlie/Mary timestamp. ;)


End file.
